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THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE OTHER-WORLD 

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traditional apocalyptic symbolism, which has lost its meaning, 
and a form of teaching in harmony with the highest moral 
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MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 



THE GOD THAT JESUS 

SAW 



W. GARRETT HORDER 



"Correct the portrait by the living face — 
Man's God by God's God in the mind of man." 

Robert Browning 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON, CHICAGO 

1922 






PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 



3 0^b\0 

AS 



FOREWORD 

Preaching before the University of Cambridge in the 
year 1846, Frederick Myers of Keswick — one of the 
seers of the nineteenth century — said : "I fear it 
may be that in some degree our theology has been 
impairing our reUgion/' and then he added, " the 
remedy for this is a firmer and fuller faith in the 
highest Idea of God." ^ 

No words could better express my own feeling 
in writing these pages. I have always felt that the 
one thing vital to a true religion is the moral and 
spiritual perfection of its God ; and I have, therefore, 
refused to give assent or to make known anything 
out of harmony with such perfection, even though 
it may have been included in the Creeds, Confessions, 
or dogmas of the Churches. Indeed, the one test 
I have appUed to every doctrine has been : " Is it 
consistent with the idea of perfect Fatherhood in 
God ? " For I have always believed that the central 
and supreme purpose of Jesus was to reveal this 
perfect God whom He called and encouraged men to 
call ''Father." 

1 Sermons before the University of Cambridge by the late 
Frederic Myers, M.A., Perpetual Curate of St, John's, Keswick, 
1852, p. 2Z. 

V 



vi FOREWORD 

In the assurance of this perfect Fatherhood of 
God I have found the resting-place for my soul, and 
I am anxious that others who have not, should find 
this place of rest. Long experience of life has 
shown me that many obstacles bar the way thereto, 
and, therefore, in the pages which follow I have 
done what little I could to remove such obstacles. 
If in any small measure I have succeeded my heart 
will be made glad. 

Whilst I alone am responsible for the beliefs 
expressed, I am greatly indebted to Miss Maud 
Russell Beasley for unsparing devotion of time 
and thought, to the Rev. Gerald H. Paulet, B.A., 
Oxon, for valuable suggestions, and to Dr. Hastings 
Rashdall, Dean of Carlisle, of whose wide and 
accurate learning I was glad to avail myself, 
and who with great kindness read the manuscript 
and sent me notes of much value. To all these I 
offer my most hearty thanks. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 

I. The Perfect Father Jesus saw , i 

IL The Revealing of God's Perfection 

THROUGH His Requirements. , 21 

PART II 

WHAT HIDES GOD'S PERFECTION 
FROM MEN? 



I. His Non-intervention 
II. Unfatherly Elements in Nature 
HI. Certain Passages in Scripture. 
IV. Creeds and Confessions . 



Creedless Saints 



32 

59 
70 
80 

no 



PART III 

I. Jesus calling Men to this Perfec- 
tion 117 

IL The Open Doors of God • . .139 



riii CONTENTS 

PART IV 

I. The Right Attitude to the Word . 150 

II. The Perils of Bibliolatry . . 165 

III. A Homogeneous Bible . . . 181 

IV. The Ever-inspiring Spirit . . 196 

PART V 
A Forward Look 208 



THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

PART I 

I 

THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 

That was a very wise collier who, when leading a 
Bible-class of his mates, said : '' Whatever we do, 
lads, let us keep clear the character of Gqd." It 
seems, indeed, a positive duty for all who think on 
this great matter to reach the truest possible con- 
clusions. As Dr. Wicksteed says: ''For inasmuch 
as a man who has formed a wholly false conception 
of God and feels emotionally moved towards this 
creatiure of his imagination is not really loving God, 
it follows that, in proportion as our conception of 
God approaches the truth, so our love is indeed love 
of God, and not of an idol/' ^ It is said that Queen ' 
Victoria idoHsed her husband, the Prince Consort ; 
but the Prince did not want to be idolised, he wanted 
to be understood. The Queen never understood 
him, and the Prince was a lonely man to the end. 
Would it not be true to say that the Great Father 
longs to be understood — that is, in an ethical and 

^ Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy, p. 261, 
I 



2 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

spiritual sense apprehended — rather than idoHsed, 
that He would rather be apprehended as to His vital 
relationship to men than ignorantly and so wrongly 
worshipped by His children, since to apprehend Him, 
in even a far-off way, would draw them to something 
far higher than idolising — to response of heart and 
obedience of life. 

As I have gone over the representations men 
have made of Him in the metaphysics of the Greek 
and the legalism of the Latin, culminating in the 
awful articles of the Westminster Confession of 
Faith, I could not help feehng how the great Fatherly 
heart must have suffered. Far beyond anything 
else, the conception of the character of his God 
determines the nature of a man's religion. That is 
usually estimated by the creed he recites, or the 
mode in which he worships, whether through 
extemporary or liturgical forms, with a simple or 
ornate ritual, but far deeper and more influential is 
the character of God which rises before his mind 
and moves his heart. 

This has been controverted by pointing to men 
and women with the most terrible conceptions of the 
character of God, who have yet lived very pure and 
noble lives. No one who has considered the subject 
will deny this. With even the vision of a Sultanic God 
before their eyes, many have pursued with steadfast 
purpose the way of righteousness, and have left the 
memory of very holy lives. But a closer acquaint- 
ance with them would have brought to light the 
fact that their hearts ached at the thought of God 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 3 

which filled their minds, and that, amid all their 
fidelity, their service was that of servants and did 
not rise, or rose only fitfully, in moments of ecstasy, 
to the joyousness and freedom of sons. Within 
the circle of mxy own acquaintances there have been 
many devoted and holy lives, which called forth 
my warmest admiration, but all the while beneath 
the surface there was often a heart agony, a distress 
of mind, caused by their wrong vision of God, which 
made lives, nobly lived and which should have been 
filled with joy, to be shadowed by the vision which 
filled their minds and troubled their hearts. And 
only when the true vision of the Father which 
Christ revealed rose before their eyes did they 
pursue the way of holiness, not with the trembling 
feet of fear, but with the gladness of those whose 
vision had wakened a love which casts out the fear 
which hath torment. No sight can be sadder than 
that of men and women steadily pursuing the way of 
holiness, but with a distorted vision of God that robs 
them of much of a joy which is rightly theirs, and 
which would be theirs if they saw God, not through 
the unworthy doctrines which men have framed of 
God, but through the great revealing of Him who, 
above and beyond all others, really knew God. 

Two incidents in the career of Thomas Erskine 
of Linlathen may serve to show how great a change 
is wrought in mind and heart by realisation of the 
Fatherhood of God : 

*' He once met a shepherd in the Highlands, to 
whom, ' in that tone which combined in so peculiar 



4 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

a manner sweetness and command/ he put the 
unlooked-for question, ' Do you know the Father ? ' 
The shepherd, taken aback, said nothing ; but the 
wonderful tone and personality of the questioner 
made so deep an impression upon his mind that he 
could not get past the question put to him, nor yet 
dismiss it from his mind, with the remarkable 
result that, meeting Mr. Erskine many years after- 
wards, the shepherd recognised him at once, and said, 
' I know the Father now/ " ^ 

The other incident may show that the surest way 
to lead to confidence in this Fatherhood is the human 
one indicated by Jesus : "If ye, being evil, know 
how to give good things unto your children, how 
much more will your Father which is in heaven 
-^ give good things to them that ask Him ? " 

" Mr. Erskine was once taken by Lady Matilda 
Maxwell to see a farmer of whose recovery there 
was no hope, but who was terribly afraid, and said, 
' I cannot face the idea of dying.' To calm his mind, 
Mr. Erskine asked, ' Would you like me to go with 
you ? ' which called forth the obvious reply, ' How 
can a man go with another when he is dying ? ' 
But, as the farmer grew more excited, Mr. Erskine 
asked, " Would you like me to go with you if I 
could ? ' 'Of course I would,' said the farmer. 
' Why ? ' asked Mr. Erskine. ' Oh, because that 
now we are such friends, I am sure you wouldn't let 
anything very bad happen to me.' On this said 
Mr. Erskine, ' Do you think I am better than God ? 
Anything which you Uke in me comes out from Him, 
for I did not make myself. Depend upon it that 
He is better than I am, and likes you better too ; 

^ Erskine ofLinlathen, by H, E. Henderson, p. 122. 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 5 

depend upon it that He will not let anything very 
bad happen to you. Believe me, it will not be so 
bad as you think ; believe me, it will be easier. Just 
put it into His hands, just leave yourself with Him, 
and I am sure that He will see you through it better 
than I could.' Next day Mr. Erskine returned, 
and the farmer said, ' I have been thinking, sir, of 
what you said, and I find something in it ; and I am 
trying to lift it from myself and put it upon God, and 
I feel a kind of help in it.' A few days after, when 
death came, he met it not only without fear, but 
with hope and even triumph.'' ^ 

It should be enough to point all walking in the 
shadow of unworthy ideas of God to the clear, 
definite, emphatic declaration of Christ of His 
perfect Fatherhood. But, unhappily, there are 
often many old and deeply rooted ideas of God in 
the mind which prevent the entrance of the nobler 
ones presented by Christ ; and there are many things 
both in the world and in Scripture which seem to 
bar the way to the great Evangel of Christ as to 
this perfect Fatherhood. And the purpose of the 
pages which follow is to open the road by clearing 
away the obstacles to the full assurance of Christ's 
great declaration, '' Be ye therefore perfect, even as 
your Father which is in heaven is perfect." 

Two prefatory remarks must be made to set this 
declaration in its proper light. The first is, that the 
perfection here spoken of is that of a Father, There 
are varieties of perfection. There is the perfection 

1 Present-day Papers, edited by Bishop Ewing. Third Series 
pp. 17-19. 



6 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

of the craftsman, reached when his work cannot 
be better done. There is the perfection of the 
judge whose judgments are just. There is the 
perfection of the ruler whose rule is for his people's 
good ; besides many others which need not be named. 
And a man may be perfect in any one of these, but 
imperfect in other respects. 

Now, the perfection here spoken of is that of a 

Father. Of course, God must be perfect in every 

respect ; but it is to the perfection of His Father- 

-hood we are here pointed — that is, perfection in His 

relation to us. His children on earth. 

The second thing is, that the name '' Father " really 
stands for parent, and includes the fatherly and motherly 
element. We males have no right to monopolise 
parentage, either in the home or in our idea of God. 
Theodore Parker, the great American preacher, 
always spoke of God as Father-Mother God. And 
he was right. The prophet discerned this when he 
put into the mouth of Jehovah the declaration, 
wonderful for that age, '' As one whom his mother 
comforteth, so will I comfort you.'' That should 
bring into our thought a tender element, quite 
lacking in those who always speak of Him as the 
Almighty, which is Society's word, and reveals the 
hardness and crudeness of its idea of Him. 

Thousands of hearts are troubled because they 
have had thrust upon them the vision of a far from 
perfect God — one, indeed, who is said to have taken 
their loved ones from their side in the recent war, 
or taken their babies from the nurture of their 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 7 

bosom, as many a sorrowing parent has been told 
by unthinking comforters. Such terrible caricatures 
of God as these have not only been turning hearts 
away from religion, but have caused inexpressible 
anguish. And cases have come under my notice 
in which, when such misrepresentations of God have 
been wisely and tenderly removed, a great agony of 
heart has been healed, which has found expression 
even outwardly in the features of the face. 

It seems almost incredible that nearly tv/o 
thousand years after Jesus declared the perfection 
of God's Fatherhood refutation of such misrepre- 
sentations should be needed ; but so it is ! And 
there is no truth which followers of Jesus should 
more clearly and vigorously make known than this 
perfection. 

Protestants have often taken more care of the 
character of their Bible than of their God. Chilling- 
worth's declaration that the Bible, and the Biblealone, 
is the religion of Protestants is a sign of this. Catho- 
lics have often taken more care of the character of 
their Church than of their God, and thus the Church 
has practically become their God. A nobleman who 
claimed to be a good CathoUc declared to a relative 
of mine that he " did not believe in Christ or the 
Bible, but he believed in the Church, and the Church,'^ 
when he died, would see him through.'' He will 
surely find in the other world that neither his Church 
nor any other Church will have any such power. 
But the supreme matter is the character of God. If, 
before men's eyes everywhere, the vision of a perfect 



8 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Father could be lifted and kept, it would gradually 
but surely waken the sense of brotherhood among 
men which just now is the supreme need of the 
world. No effort should be too great to banish 
the hard visions of God's character which have 
held the minds of men and to put in their place that 
perfect fatherhood which was the very centre of 
-Christ's teaching and the very goal of His ministry. 
But, though nearly two thousand years have elapsed 
since He declared the perfection of this Fatherhood, 
it is even now rarely realised in its fulness. 

In his sermon to the Church Congress of 1920 at 
Southend, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached 
on the Fatherhood of God. He said : 

'' Less than a hundred years ago George Canning 
told this story to a listening House of Commons : 
He had gone, he said, a few Simdays before to a 
poor Kttle Presbyterian church in Hatton Garden. 
There he heard from an inconspicuous preacher — 
it was Edward Irving, not yet famous — a new and 
startling phrase which had haunted him ever since^ — 
the Fatherhood of God." 

The Archbishop then said : 

" The underljdng thought of the phrase which 
came to him so arrestingly was, of course, in no 
sense new. But, strangely enough, the actual 
phrase does not seem to have been previously in 
use." 

Now the Archbishop is wrong in his story. Can- 
ning did not hear the phrase — it was reported to 
him by Sir James Mackintosh, who had heard Irving 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 9 

in his prayer speak of some orphans as " thrown upon 
the Fatherhood of God/' But the Archbishop makes 
a more serious mistake when he says that the thought 
was in no sense new. It was new to that time. If 
the thought had been there, it would have found, 
as thought always does, some phrase for its expres- 
sion. Indeed, even in the earlier years of my own 
Ufe, the Fatherhood of God was regarded as heresy, 
and men were thrust from their pulpits for pro- 
claiming it. That was the case with Dr. McLeod 
Campbell, who was ejected from the church at Row, 
on the Gareloch, and Alexander J. Scott, who, 
thrust from the ministry for the same reason, became 
the first Principal of Owens College, which is now 
the University of Manchester. Through the fidelity 
to the teaching of Christ of such and other like- 
minded men, the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God 
has almost ceased to be regarded as a heresy ; but 
it is still imperfectly accepted and applied, and 
there are still many things which are urged against it. 
In one sense the Fatherhood of God has been 
known from the time of Christ to our own ; and in 
a certain sporadic way, it was known and proclaimed 
before His time by the Hebrew prophets, to say 
nothing concerning hints of it in quite other realms. 
And all down the Christian centuries it could not 
have been wholly missed, since it forms the preface 
to the Lord's Prayer, which has always held its 
place in and even beyond the Church. But from 
the earliest down to almost our own time it has 
rarely if ever reached the fulness and vitaUty of 



10 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

meaning which really belongs to the idea of Father- 
hood. It would be difficult to find, till quite recent 
times, those who extended it to the whole race 
which owes its existence to God. Everywhere, or 
nearly everywhere, it was limited to those who 
believed or had been baptized or were in some way 
within the pale of the Church. Whilst, beyond this, 
those who beheved in the Fatherhood seemed to be 
able at the same time to believe things absolutely 
incompatible with it. For example. Fatherhood, 
any real sense, rules out the idea of everlasting 
punishment, even to those unresponsive to its calls 
and persuasions. And it also rules out what has 
even yet been rarely realised, the need for any 
persuasions to obtain the mercy of God. All that 
the earthly father, in spite of his imperfections, 
demands as a condition of his mercy to an offending 
child, is such sorrow for wrongdoing that his for- 
giveness can be rightly given and received. But 
men beUeved, or thought they believed, in the 
Divine Fatherhood when all the while they regarded 
Jesus, not as the expression or commendation, but as 
the persuasion of that Father to forgiveness of His 
repentant children. In this respect the Divine 
Fatherhood even now is rarely apprehended in its 
breadth and fulness. 

As an article of the Creed, Fatherhood in God has 
never been absent from the faith of the Church, but 
as a vitaUty of experience, with all its great impUca- 
tions, it has even now reached but a small proportion 
even of those who bear the name of Christian. And 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 11 



U 



it was not till men like Thomas Erskine, Alexander ■" /^ 
John Scott, and McLeod Campbell were persuaded f{<^^ 
of the Divine Fatherhood and their ideas gained 
expression through preachers like Frederic Denison 
Maurice and poets like George MacDonald that 
the idea in its vitality and with its great implications 
became the conviction of any great number of 
Christian people. 

When this idea of the Fatherly nature of God, 
which had emerged in the teaching of the men just 
named and other pioneer minds, passed out into 
wider circles, it was objected that no place was found 
in it for those sterner elements which find expression 
in the teaching of Scripture, and that it placed on 
the throne of the universe a weakly indulgent rather 
than a righteous ruler. Doubtless, in the repre- 
sentations of ill-balanced minds this was sometimes 
the case, but it certainly was not so in the case of 
the men to whom I have referred, whose vision was 
of Fatherhood in its fulness and perfection. Even 
in the case of earthly fatherhoods, when they reach 
to high levels, there are found the characteristics of 
the king and the judge ; they are at once rulers 
and judges over their families, but it is love which 
is the very heart of their fatherhood, and the regal 
and judicial qualities are only the ways through 
which love best expresses itself and reaches its end. 

This is my own conception of the Fatherly nature 
of God and that it works not through direct action, 
rewarding and punishing from without, but, as it 
were, from within, through that constitution of 



,v% 



12 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Nature which ever leads to the overthrow of the evil 
and the establishment of the good. The Hebrew 
mind thought of the action of God as direct and 
from without. The modem mind, believing quite 
as fully as the Hebrew in Divine influence, regards 
it as springing out of the very order of the universe, 
as originally constituted by God. But, however 
that may be, the vision of Divine Fatherhood 
presented in these pages is not of one who loves not 
wisely but too well, but of one " righteous in all His 
ways and holy in all His v/orks.'' 

Now, there are many things in the Old Dispensation 
which have wrongly been brought into the New, which 
tend to conceal this perfect Fatherhood, In the pages 
of the Old Testament Jehovah is mixed up with 
much that is warUke. There is the record of many 
campaigns, and Jehovah is said to be the Patron of 
Israel and to fight on its behalf. And because of 
this the name '' the Lord of Hosts '' has been given 
to Him in the Psalms and other parts of the Old 
Testament. And so the title '' the Lord of Hosts '' 
is still applied to Him, even in our Christian dispensa- 
tion. " The Lord of Hosts is with us '' was not only 
the battle-cry of Cromwell and his troops, who used 
the Old far more than the New Testament, but in 
our Christian worship we often use the same words 
when we sing of Him. It is indeed difficult to get 
this fighting name for God out of even the devotional 
parts of the Old Testament used in our worship. 
And the battle stories of the Old Testament, with 
their belief in Jehovah as the great Captain, have 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 13 

done and are still doing much to keep alive that 
fighting tendency which hinders the peace and 
concord so needed by the nations of the world. 

And, of course, the idea of God as the inspirer 
and leader of war, and His title as the Lord of 
Hosts, are absolutely out of accord with the declara- 
tion of Christ of His perfect Fatherhood. The two 
cannot exist side by side in the same mind. Perfect 
Fatherhood must thrust out utterly all such ideas, 
for a Father — a perfect Father of all — could not be 
either the inspirer or leader of war between different 
parts of His family. We must get rid of all names 
for Him which make Him a Captain of Battles rather 
than the Head of a Family. 

In the fourth century Bishop Ulphilas, who gave 
the Goths a written language and translated the 
Bible for them, omitted the Books of Kings and 
Samuel in order that his people might not find in 
them an additional stimulus to their warlike enter- 
prises, an example worthy of imitation, for the war 
stories of the Old Testament greatly foster the war 
spirit. 

And then, too, theology has often been a great obscurer 
of this Perfect Fatherhood of God,^ Until quite 
recently, the idea rarely appeared in works of theo- 
logy, and when it did it was with all sorts of limita- 
tions or reservations. If a Father, He was only of a 

1 More than three-quarters of a century ago that far-seeing 
man, Frederick Myers, of Keswick, saw this, for, preaching 
before the University of Cambridge, he said : "I fear it may be 
that in some degree our theology has been impairing our religion " 
(Six Sermons, p. 22). 



14 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

little company who believed, and their beUef must 
be of a very definite and orthodox kind. And in 
many theologies only an elected company, and that 
a small one, could be in His family, and the rest — 
and that a vast rest — were doomed to eternal omis- 
sion from the family, and, worse than that, to eternal 
punishment for not becoming what the Divine decree 
had made impossible. No greater hiders of the 
perfect Fatherhood of God ever darkened the earth 
than those called Calvinists. There was really some 
ground for John Wesley's saying that " the Calvinisms 
God was worse than his devil, for his devil only 
tempted him to sin, and his God compelled him to 
sin/' 

And then this awful calumny against God's Father- 
hood filtered out from books and professors of theology 
into the pulpit, and so reached the people at large. 
Until comparatively recently, the perfect Fatherhood 
of God was more preached against than preached. 
It was argued against ; it was ridiculed ; it was 
denoimced as '* heresy.'' And the greater part of 
the doctrine actually preached was absolutely 
out of harmony with such Fatherhood. St. Paul 
says it " pleased God by the foolishness of preaching 
to save them that believe " — of course, he did not 
mean that by foolish preaching men would be 
saved ; what he meant was that preaching seemed a 
foolish method to save men. If foolish preaching 
could have saved men, there has been such a vast 
quantity of it down the ages that by this time all 
in Christendom should have been saved ! 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 15 

And it cannot be doubted that foolish preaching 
has greatly hidden the perfection of God's Father- 
hood. In my early days what was preached was 
not the perfect Fatherhood of God, but the three 
R's : Ruin by the Fall, which Christ never preached ; 
Redemption by the Blood ; and Regeneration by 
the Holy Ghost. All three were usually got out of 
every text. In many an age and place the pulpit 
has obscured rather than revealed this Father- 
hood. And this has not wholly ceased. In support 
of this, let me quote from a sermon preached at 
the beginning of the war : 

" The God after this war will be to many different 
from the God before the war, because we shall have 
seen His power and grace and know by experience 
who can help us best. There will be a revival of 
true Christianity after this, and it was needed and 
prayed for a long time ; but we never thought it 
would come this way — that a war-cloud would be 
big with mercy and would break with blessing on 
our head. But God brings His olive-branches of 
peace in chariots of war — for what was Calvary but 
the battle-ground of God? — and when Christ 
conquered by dying He became our peace.'' ^ 

And then, too, even some of the poets who should 
have been revealers of this Divine Fatherhood have 
often been its obseurers. And, unfortunately, the 
charm of their verse has carried their influence into 
circles beyond the Church. This is the case with 
two of the greatest poets of the world, Dante and 

1 Why God permits War, a sermon by the Rev. W, L. Gibbs, ' 
1914. 



16 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Milton, whose poems have obscured rather than 
revealed the Divine Fatherhood. It was their 
misfortune to be cast in ages whose theology was 
spiritually hard. Dante drew in the mediaeval 
theology with his breath. Milton, though himself 
an Arian, was of the Puritan period, which was 
Calvinistic. And these theologies, which had no 
place for a real Fatherhood of God, find expression 
in their poems — that of Dante in the Divine Comedy, 
that of Milton in Paradise Lost. In these, poetic 
phrasing is at its highest, theology at its lowest. 
I have been going over the first section of the 
Divine Comedy called '' Hell,'' where each circle holds 
sinners of a particular type, to whom are meted 
out punishments like to their sins, and I have asked 
myself : Can one imagine a real father dooming 
any of his family, however sinful, to such never- 
ending woe ? 

I suppose the best-kno\vn line of Dante is the 
inscription over the gate of Hell : " All hope 
abandon, ye who enter here/' Would any true father 
banish hope from the sky even of a prodigal son ? 
I was once asked for advice as to what course a 
father, whose son had gone astray, should take. 
I at once replied, '' Let him never close the door of 
the home against him." And I am sure that in such 
advice I was in harmony with the will of God. The 
door was kept open, and that prodigal son is now 
witliin the home circle. ^ 

1 What is here said about Dante is in regard to the influence 
the Divwe Comedy has had in framing popular conceptions of 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 17 

And in lesser degree it may be said of Milton's 
Paradise Lost — great poetry, but bad theology. No 
one can imagine a perfect Father planning the 
world as pictured in either Dante or Milton. These 
works have enriched our poetry, but they have 
not aided or upHfted our religion. And as Dante's 
cosmogony of the earth as the centre of the Universe 
and stationary, and the sun as rising and setting, is 
now obsolete, so his theology, which was equally 
erroneous, should be regarded as also obsolete. 
If we want aid from the poets to the vision of the 
Fatherhood of God, we must come to later ones, 
touched by the breath of the spirit which has been 

the other world. This has tended, in my judgment, to render 
that world, even to the godly, an object of fear rather than of 
anticipation. The writer of the article " The Spirit World " in 
the Dante Supplement to The Times on the six hundredth 
anniversary of his death, who clearly is a fervent Dante-lover, 
says : " The tragedies they tell create pity and fear that are 
unforgettable. Yet not all the beauties of the cantos devoted 
to ' Malebolge,' and they are many, can redeem the repulsive- 
ness of the physical torments described. The floggings and the 
boiling pitch, the devils with horns and hoofs, the serpents, the 
butcheries, and the loathsome diseases are merely hideous. 
Their ugliness and their grossness jar with the rest of the picture, 
as Fra Angelico's Hell jars with the lovely Heaven, both plainly 
inspired by Dante, in his ' Last Judgment.' '* To the ordinary 
reader who cannot strip ofE this awful mediaevalism, Dante's 
picture of Hell cannot but cast a dark shadow over the face of 
God. 

It may be otherwise with those whose minds are able to do 
what, in his letter to Can Grande, Dante himself suggests — that 
his "poem may be interpreted both allegorically and mystically 
as well as literally," and who can thus reach down to the eternal 
realities or essences hidden beneath Dante's mediaevalism. 
Help to this may be found in Six Sermons by Dr. Wicksteed, 
especially in the Appendix, who in his last book makes the 

2 



18 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

liberatHag our religion from the hardness of earlier 
times. 

It may be asked, What bearing has all this upon 
us to-day ? It has a great bearing, for the vision 
of God before our eyes has the most potent influence 
upon our character and course. If our vision be 
of a Lord of Hosts, then there is justification for 
advocacy of war ; for if God be indeed the Leader 
of Armies, then there is no reason why we should not 
advocate and even join in war. There is no more 
potent influence against efforts to make wars cease 
than the idea that they are approved of God. Until 

following illuminating distinction between Aquinas and Dante : 
" Aquinas shocks us so; deeply when he speaks of Hell, not 
because he believes in it, but because he seeks to show that 
to our human judgment its existence proves itself as good ; 
Dante believed in Hell as firmly as Aquinas did, but he conceals 
neither from himself nor from his readers the revolt of his 
feelings against its apparent injustice " {Reactions between Dogma 
and Philosophy, p. 564). But this naturally makes us ask, If the 
injustice was apparent to Dante, how much more apparent must 
it have been to the perfectly just eye of God ? 

And for myself, I come back from reading of Dante, especially 
the "Hell,'' and ask myself the question. Is itworthwhile to occupy 
my mind with pictures of Hell which revolt my sense of justice, 
and which must therefore be out of harmony with the infinitely 
higher sense of justice in God, because of the supreme literary 
skill with which those pictures are painted ? Should I be 
willing to ponder descriptions which did injustice to a dear friend 
simply because of the literary skill with which they were written ? 
Admiration for genius may thus hurt what is far more important : 
the sense of Perfect Fatherhood in God. For that I confess I am 
very jealous. It may be the writer in The Times supplement 
already quoted is not without some such feeling, for he says : 
*' We wonder for what supposed treasure so fair a casket was 
wrought ; but the key is lost. We praise the workmanship, and 
turn away perplexed and disappointed," 



THE PERFECT FATHER JESUS SAW 19 

warlike ideas of God are rooted out, wars are likely 
to continue. Not until the idea of a Divine Warrior 
fades before Christ's picture of a perfect Fatherhood 
in God are counsels of peace likely to prevail among 
the nations. 

If our vision be of a God who is so unjust as to 
choose out an elect few for eternal life and pass by 
the rest and condemn them to eternal misery for 
their sins — to the praise of His glorious justice, 
as the Westminster Confession of Faith declares — 
so long as that vision of God remains before our 
eyes justice will find neither example nor warrant 
in the Divine Nature. 

So long as our vision of God is of one who only 
cares for accuracy of doctrine we shall be content 
with orthodoxy— right opinion, instead of what is 
far more important — orthopraxy — right practice, 
right living, right character. 

The great directing force in religion is our vision 
of God — if it be a right vision it will lead us in the 
right way ; if it be a wrong vision it will lead us in 
the wrong way. 

And then, beyond this, unless our vision of God 
be that of a perfect Father, we are not true to Jesus 
Christ, the Leader and Lord of our Faith. Unless 
that be our vision we are not really in the Christian 
way or true to the Christian type. Perfect Father- 
hood in God was the very heart of Christ's Evangel 
to the world. To lead us to that He lived, taught, 
laboured, died. To miss or turn away from that 
is to turn away from Christ Himself. It is almost 



20 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

unthinkable — it is certainly horrible — to know that 
for teaching God's perfect and universal Fatherhood, 
saintly and faithful men were driven out of the 
Church which bore the name of Christ. But such is 
the terrible fact, and it is a great blot on the 
Church's escutcheon. Till it is quite erased the 
Church will stand dishonoured before the world. 

The supreme effort of the Church to-day should 
be not only to wipe out such false pictures of God — 
of the warrior God, of the unjust God, of the hard 
God — ^but to put in their place the perfect Father 
in whom Christ trusted and whom He revealed to 
the world. 

Let the Great Revealer's vision of the Father 
sink down into our mind and heart, and we cannot 
help looking out on men everjwhere as dear to 
Him and therefore knit to us by ties which can never 
be broken. 

For centuries the world has had a distorted and 
unfatherUke vision of God; hence the confusions 
which so perplex our hearts. It is high time that 
the true vision of God as Perfect Father dawned 
on our sight, for it will be the great djniamic to 
that peace and concord which beyond all else the 
world so sorely needs. 



II 

THE REVEALING OF GOD^S PERFECTION 
THROUGH HIS REQUIREMENTS 

Everyone who thinks, at some time or other 
must wonder what God's attitude to humanity 
really is. The soldier who came to his chaplain 
with the question, '' Padre, what is God like ? " 
gave voice to an almost imiversal curiosity. It is 
thaty rather than the question '' Is there a God ? " 
which occupies the minds of men. In some form 
or other all men believe that God exists. Matthew 
Arnold recognised Him as " a power not ourselves 
making for righteousness,'' Emerson as " an Over- 
Soul,'' Herbert Spencer as '' an Eternal Energy," 
Sir John Seeley as '' a Natural Law," the Christian 
Scientist thinks of Him as " a Divine Principle," and 
even Lucretius says, " When I think of the atoms 
moving through space a kind of divine rapture lays 
hold of me." All these thus acknowledged an exist- 
ence for which the common name is God. Even those 
calling themselves atheists, when forced to define 
their position, always, or nearly always, admit there 
is a God, or something to take His place. 

Travelling once from Leghorn to Pisa, I got into 

21 



22 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

conversation with a Frenchman, who said, " I am 
an atheist, you know/' I answered, " I don't 
beheve it ; for I never yet met an atheist/' He 
repUed, '' Of course, I beheve there is a God, but 
I don't think we can know anything about Him/' 
I said, " You are not an atheist, for an atheist denies 
the existence of God. Your proper name is Agnostic 
— one who denies the possibihty of any knowledge 
of Him/' 

It is not the existence of God of which men are in 
doubt ; it is concerning His nature that they are 
perplexed. It is not so much as to whether He is 
immanent or transcendent — that is, whether He is 
present in all things, or dwelling apart ; it is rather 
what is His attitude. His feeling to men, that they are 
so anxious to know. That lies at the core of the 
cry of Moses : ''I pray Thee, show me Thy glory " — 
show me what is Thy feeling and purpose to me. 
That lies at the heart of the great cry of Job : *' Oh 
that I knew where I might find Him, that I might 
come even to His seat ! " — that is, to such close 
contact as to know His inner nature. 

These are world cries — they express what often 
lies unexpressed in the heart of men everywhere. 
We all long to know what is the attitude, the rela- 
tionship, the feeling of God to us men and women. 
Any light, however feeble, on this great matter is 
welcome. Light comes to us from many quarters — 
from the world in which our lot is cast, from our 
own natures, especially from what we call *' con- 
science " ; but some light may be ours from a quarter 



REVEx\LING OF GOD'S PERFECTION 23 

which is rarely explored, but which has been finely 
opened in those two lines of Whittier : 

*' By all that He requires of me, 
I know what God Himself must be." 

Those are two of the most significant lines in English 
poetry. I know of none more significant, even in 
the greatest poets, such as Dante or Milton — greater 
in the poetic art, but not so great as Whittier in their 
insight into Divine matters. Indeed, I know of no 
poet whose vision of God so commends itself to my 
heart and mind, which seems so reasonable and 
spiritual, and in which I can rest my soul. Dante 
pictures a God who wakens fear; but Whittier 
pictures a God in whom both my heart and mind 
can rest. 

And in the lines I have quoted he opens a new 
pathway to the knowledge of what God really is — 
that is, of how He really feels to us men and women. 
And in his doing of this he moves along the way 
opened by Jesus Christ, who of all the sons of men 
saw the deepest into the heart of God — who by Hisu 
doing of the Will was closest to God, and knew most 
of the secrets of His nature. It is happily becoming 
more and more acknowledged that in spiritual vision 
of God, Jesus Christ is supreme. That idea is 
gradually spreading itself over the earth. In a 
recent book in which the thoughts of all sorts of 
people are expressed — of orthodox and heretic, 
of the West and East — Jesus is acknowledged to 
be the nearest to God, and so the surest exponent 
of His nature. 



24 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

And when we look closely into His teaching, we 
find that one way of knowing what God is hke is to 
see what He would have us he. His precepts to men 
are an outshining of His own Nature. What He 
would have men he is an expression of that which 
is deepest in His own heart. In an earthly home, 
the precepts of the parents, by which they would 
regulate the course of their children, which reveal 
what they would have their children do and so 
become, are a very sure indication of what they 
themselves are. And if we go over the words of 
- Christ in such utterances as the Sermon on the Mount 
we may discover not only His ideal for men, but in 
that ideal an expression of the deepest nature of 
God as He saw Him. Christ bids men obey these 
precepts — that " they may he perfect, even as their 
Father who is in heaven is perfect ^ If obedience 
to the precepts is to liken men to God, it is clear 
that they must be an expression of His ov^oi nature. 
When, therefore, we look at these precepts, we see 
what, to the mind of Jesus, is in the nature of 
God ; and so we get some help — indeed, much help 
— in knowing what God is like. God must Himself 
be in harmony with the precepts He lays on us. 

It must be admitted that there are c^rtew precepts, 
say, of the Sermon on the Mount, which only apply 
to men, and cannot apply to God at all, as in an earthly 
home there are things incumbent on the children 
which are not incumbent on the parents. For 
example, obedience is a duty for the child ; it is 
scarcely a duty for the parent. It must be evident 



REVEALING OF GOD'S PERFECTION 25 

that certain precepts of the Sermon on the Mount 
are appKcable only to men, and not to God. Certain 
even of the Beatitudes cannot apply to Him ; for 
example, '* Blessed are they which do hunger and 
thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." 
We cannot think of God hungering and thirsting 
for a righteousness which, in the very nature of 
things, must be eternally His. 

But, then, in the earthly home there are things 
proper to and binding on parents and children 
alike y where there is no difference between them save 
in age and experience of life. Truthfulness, justice, 
kindness, love are incumbent on both parents and 
children. Precepts concerning these apply to both. 

And if we go over the precepts of Christ, especially 
in the Sermon on the Mount, whilst we shall find 
certain that apply, and can only apply, to men, to 
whom they are addressed, we shall find certain others 
which, if I may reverently say so, are as binding on 
God as on us. Indeed, they are the outcome of 
His appreciation of and loyalty to them. Take 
the precept, '' Love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate you and 
pray for them which despitefuUy use you and 
persecute you.'' And that this is so is made clear 
by what follows : '' that ye may he the children of 
your Father which is in heaven " — in other words, 
that ye may be like your Father — ^who, therefore, 
must Himself be loving to His enemies. Now that 
is a far-reaching idea, which makes a good deal that 
passes for Christianity look rather foolish. Until 



26 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

recently, we were taught that God felt something 
very different from love to His enemies. We used 
to hear that for them there was a punishment that 
would be everlasting ; and it is not very long ago 
that the punishment was declared to be physical, 
and pictures were painted, both in colour and in 
words, of torments such as even the Spanish Inqui- 
sitors, even at their worst, never reached, for their 
torments were limited to earth, but those of God 
had no Umit. If that is how God treats His enemies 
^\He does not obey His own precepts ! And many 
a man and woman of forgiving temper has risen to 
greater heights of goodness than that. A God who 
hated His enemies and meted out to them everlasting 
torment could not, would not dare to bid us love 
our enemies. That precept alone, without the 
great declaration '' God is Love,'' or " God so loved 
the world,'' is enough to consign to the limbo of 
forgetfulness the idea that He hates and visits His 
enemies with never-ending torment. 

And of God's love, even of His enemies, Jesus saw 
clear illustration in the world of Nature. *' For He 
maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the good, 
and sendeth His rain on the just and the unjust." 
There, before our eyes, Jesus seems to say, is visible 
proof of universal love and not hate in God.^ In this 
realm, God does not hold off His blessed confer- 

1 " Christ had no scientific light to guide Him to this con- 
clusion. Nevertheless, He seems to have reached it by His 
faith in the perfect moral character of God, whose love He held 
to extend to those who hated as well as loved Him." — Th^ 
Spirit of Christianity, by Frederick Seebohm, p. io6. 



REVEALING OF GOD'S PERFECTION 27 

ments of sun and rain from those who hold aloof 
from Him. Their aloofness from Him will bring its 
own loss, but the Great Lover loves them still, and 
His love prompts to gifts as generous to them as to 
the most responsive. 

And then Jesus says, "If ye love them that 
love you, what reward have ye ? Do not even the 
publicans the same?'' To say, as many do, that 
God loves only those who respond to His love is to 
reduce His love to the level of the publican. It is 
a shocking thing to hear people thoughtlessly take 
God's namic in vain, but it is really more shocking 
to hear men knowingly attribute to God things 
below the level of the pubHcan. The taking of 
God's name in vain is often only of the lip ; but to 
deUberately frame a doctrine of Him which brings 
Him down to the pubUcan's level is infinitely worse. 
Lord Bacon says: ''It were better to have no 
opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is 
unworthy of Him ; for the one is imbelief , the other 
is contumely, and certainly superstition is the re- 
proach of the Deity." And then he quotes Plutarch : 
'* Surely I had rather a great deal men should say 
there is no such man as Plutarch at all, than that 
they should say there was one Plutarch that would 
eat his children as soon as they were born," Un- 
belief has often been better than the affirmations 
concerning God sometimes made by the Church. 
To these is due much of the current neglect of 
religion. 

Or, take another precept of Christ. In answer to 



28 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

the question of Peter, " Lord, how oft shall my 
brother sin against me and I forgive him ? Till 
seven times ? " Jesus saith unto him : "I say 
not unto thee, till seven times, but until seventy 
times seven,'' which surely means continual for- 
giving — forgiveness without limit. That is the 
precept for men ; that, therefore, must he the actual 
practice of God — eternal forgiving, forgiving to which 
there is no limit. And yet, until recently, the for- 
giveness of God was declared to fall short of 
that enjoined on men. In the early times of the 
Church's history a great question of debate was 
whether sin after baptism could be forgiven ! 

Within recent years a great part of the Pro- 
testant Church held that the Divine forgiveness was 
limited, and did not reach beyond the few and 
fleeting years of man's life on earth. Sin unrepented 
of here could never find remission. If that were the 
procedure of God, then it fell far short of what He 
enjoined on man. Seventy times seven must man 
forgive — to his forgiveness there must be no limit ; 
but God's forgiveness must not reach beyond this 
earthly sphere. This is placing God below man. 
This is convincingly expressed in the belief of 
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, given by his friend, 
Bishop Ewing : ''He believed that God was direct- 
ing all things to good ends, worthy of and satisfactory 
to Himself and His creation. His necessary charac- 
ter involved, he conceived, the necessary well-being 
of creation. He did not believe this was accom- 
pUshed if any of His little ones perished, or His 



REVEALING OF GOD'S PERFECTION 29 

sheep, if ' lost/ were not again ' found/ He 
could not imagine a creature in eternal punishment 
saying, ' Can you or will you do no better for me 
than this ? ' The power of putting such a question 
as ' V/hy hast Thou made me thus ? ' involved, he 
felt, the possibility and the assurance of an answer 
satisfactory to one to whom the Creator had given 
the power to put the query, constituted as judge ; 
and to whom, if no proper answer could be given, no 
power of such sitting in judgment would have been 
given/' ^ 

What God enjoins on man is His own eternal 
practice. The seventy times seven enjoined on us 
points to an eternal forgiving in Him. And, there- 
fore, when our hearts ask '' What is God like ? '' a 
part of the answer must be, '' Like what he enjoins 
on us.'' 

I have known of many cases in which parents 
feared because their children had not shown signs 
of faith in God or of repentance toward Him on earth 
that, when they died, their one and only opportunity 
was over. I have known of parents whose sons 
at the very outbreak of the late war, not waiting 
to be conscripted, willingly offered themselves for 
the defence of their country, and feU in the great 
struggle, who, because they had not made a religious 
profession, feared they might be doomed, without 
any opportimity of salvation, in the other world. Of 
such surely it may be said that their very offeiing 

1 Present-day Papers, edited by Bishop Ewing. Third 
Series, p. ii. 



80 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

of themselves in the great cause showed that deep 
in their hearts there was something of the same 
spirit which led Jesus to the cross — they denied 
themselves, even as Jesus did. But, even beyond 
this, it should be noted that God must act upon 
His own precept to forgive, not once or twice, but 
until seventy times seven — that is, without end, so 
that any turning of the heart to Him in the other 
world would be met, as the father met the prodigal, 
with the cry, " This my son was dead, and is alive 
again, and was lost and is found/' 

Any worthy man or woman, certainly any worthy 
father or mother, at the smallest sign of sorrow for 
wrongdoing, is not only ready but longing to forgive; 
and '' If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall your 
Father which is in heaven," whose " ways are higher 
than our ways, and His thoughts than ours,'' who 
'* knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are 
dust " ? 

In the past the theologians, and some of the poets, 
have terribly lowered the character of God in that 
they thus limited the Holy One of Israel. We must 
lift the character of God up to the highest of which 
our thought is capable. As we see any examples 
of love, pity, forgiveness in men, we should say : 
*' Yes, these are beautiful ; but they are only broken 
lights of Thee, and Thou, O Lord, art more than 
they ! " 

This is boldly expressed by that most reverent 
man, George MacDonald, in one of his earliest 



REVEALING OF GOD'S PERFECTION 31 

stories in which he puts the following words on the 
tomb of one of its characters : 

*' Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodde ; 
Hae mercy o' my soul. Lord God, 
As I wad do were I Lord God 
And Ye were Martin Elginbrodde." 



PART II 

WHAT HIDES GOD'S PERFECTION FROM 

MEN? 

I 

HIS NON-INTERVENTION 

The chief difficulty with many in beUeving in the 
Fatherhood of God is that He does not intervene 
directly or visibly in human affairs ; that, for ex- 
ample, in the recent terrible war, He did nothing 
to bring decisive victory to the right and defeat 
to the wrong, that He did nothing to bring to an 
end the appalUng suffering and waste of life, 
often of the most valuable kind. Why did He 
not intervene in such a tremendous crisis ? is the 
question which is fiUing the hearts and minds of 
multitudes with doubt of the reahty of His Father- 
hood. 

It may be frankly admitted that in moments of 
crisis or peril the desire for such intervention often 
springs up in the human heart. With all reverence 
it may be said, it did so even in the heart of Jesus, 
in His temptations in the wilderness. Was not the 
very core of those temptations that there flashed 

32 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 33 

across His mind the possibility and even desirability 
of some external intervention of God on His behalf ? 
In the first temptation, that contrary to the ordinary 
routine of Nature He should suddenly provide the 
bread needed for His body ; in the second tempta- 
tion, the desirability of His Kingdom being brought 
in by external force ; in the third temptation, the 
desire for Divine intervention to save Him from 
the influence of gravitation, — all these, which were 
temptations to secure external intervention on His 
behalf, were promptly and utterly rejected. 

It is difficult to get from those who feel in this 
way any clear indication of how they think God could 
or should have intervened. It may be they fancy 
that by earthquake He might have swallowed up 
the guilty, or by a rain of fire from heaven He 
might have consumed them. When ways in which 
He might have intervened are thought out, inter- 
vention does not seem quite so clear or easy a 
matter. 

There are those who think that in past days God 
did intervene, did actually and visibly do something. 

Intervention of such a kind is, to my mind, clearly 
not the Divine way. I look over history and I do 
not discover the signs of it. I look at the human 
scene to-day, but there I cannot discern it. So far 
as I am able to see, this is not the Divine method. 
No one believes more fuUy than I do in the closeness 
of God's contact with men — that He is not merely 
near to us, but that He is in ^is, and that in Him we 
live, move, and have our being ; that whilst He does 
3 



34 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

not intervene from without y He is always working from 
within our hearts. 

" Though Master keep aloof, 
Signs of His presence multiply from roof 
To basement of the building." ^ 

But that He intervenes in a direct or visible or 
tangible way in human affairs, of that I see no trace 
either in history or in the world of to-day. His 
method does not seem to be one of intervention : 
that would place us under a theocracy. And the 
world as it is to-day would be no credit to such a 
Theos. 

There does not appear to be intervention in human 
affairs to bring to an end some great evil due to the 
wrongdoing of men. Nor does there seem to be such 
intervention when the natural order, for which God 
is regarded as responsible, fails to provide for the 
inhabitants of great districts, as in China, where for 
a whole year no rain fell, causing an entire failure of 
crops and leading to the death, it is said, of twelve 
millions of people. Nor does there seem to be such 
intervention even by the seismic needles provided 
by science in the way of warning when the internal 
forces of nature are about to break forth in earth- 
quake, swallowing up in some cases the entire popu- 
lation of great districts. The Lisbon earthquake 
in 1755 seems to have completely overthrown the 
faith of many, and more recent ones have had a like 
effect. 

These things might not have led to such overthrow 

^ R. Browning, Francis Furini. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 35 

of faith if men had faced the fact — for fact it seems 
to be — that the Divine method is not one of per- 
petual interposition, but that the race has been 
placed on this planet we call earth, within which 
there are great fires and around which there are 
great forces of wind and water, both of which usually 
make foi the good of men, but now and then relieve 
themselves by means of earthquakes, storms, 
simooms, siroccos. And men are left to search out 
the nature and method of such forces, so as to pre- 
serve themselves by getting into right relationship 
with them. 

These outbursts of Nature in earthquakes, which 
are apparently reckless and relentless, do present a 
terrible problem. The problem does not perhaps 
arise in the case of Pompeii, where, because of the 
beauty of its situation, men built and dwelt in a city 
right under a volcanic mountain, an evident safety- 
valve of nature, which they must have known was 
to expose themselves and their city to the peril of 
sudden burial. It does arise, however, in regions 
where, with no signs of a volcanic nature, whole 
populations have been overwhelmed. 

In such instances faith in the Fatherhood of 
God may, perhaps, be kept by the surmise that 
the earth has not yet been brought into harmony 
with the eternal order. Relief has come to some 
minds which find it hard to believe that such 
things can be in harmony with the Fatherhood 
of God, by the idea which has constantly been 
floating about in the world that some influence is 



86 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

hindering and even warping the Creator's work. 
The later, if not the earUest, Zoroastrians met such 
problems by a bold duaUsm. '' The first chapter 
of the Vendidad tells how Ahura Mazda created in 
order the several Iranian countries with their various 
excellences, and how for each Angra Mainyu created 
corresponding plagues — the killing cold of winter, in- 
temperate heat ; serpents, locusts, ants ; rapine and 
lust, foreign oppression ; unnatural vice, magic and 
witchcraft ; the interment of the dead, and the eating 
of carrion; pride, doubts, disbelief, evil spirits and 
demons, men of devilish character, who are in fact 
demons on earth as well as after death ; beasts of 
prey and noxious vermin, — all belong to Angra 
Mainyu, and the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred 
and ninety-nine diseases the flesh is heir to are 
his inventions/' ^ 

In the Bible the same idea emerges, though not 
so definitely. 

In the picture parable of Genesis there is the 
malign influence of the Serpent. In the book of Job 
Satan the adversary is the chief protagonist, and 
even in the New Testament there is revealed the 
hindering and harming influence of the devil. 
After the oriental manner all these are personalised, 
but when turned into their western equivalents 
they seem to point to some force, or influence, or 
imperfection, not yet in harmony with the will of 
the Creator. If such things are not of God, their 
shadow does not darken His face, and so men may 

^ G. F. Moore, History of Religions, vol. i, p. 381. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 37 

still look up thereto and worship. This disposes 
of the difficulty, but by a dualism which personally 
I cannot accept.^ 

If men will persistently cling to interventional 
ideas of the universe, and so expect deliverance (which 
does not come) from accident, storm, earthquake, 
when it does not com.e they are naturally disappointed 
and under the disappointment their faith gives way. 
Surely it is wiser to face the facts of the imiverse, 
which seem to show that men are left to grapple with 
its difficulties as they arise, to apply the powers of 
mind and hand with which they are endowed, not 
only to subduing and replenishing but to gaining 
the mastery over the earth. ^ 

When interventional ideas of the universe pre- 
vailed, men naturally looked for and even prayed for 

1 Dr. J. H. Moulton hesitates to affirm that this dualism is 
found earlier in the original doctrine of Zarathustra as set forth 
in the Gathas. He says: " I had rejected it, since it seemed to 
me inconsistent with an optimist outlook on the future. What- 
ever view Parsism has taken as to the past history of the evil 
principle, it has always declared that its future is utter and final 
destruction. If we restrict ourselves to the origin of evil and its 
development during human history, past and future, we may use 
the term 'dualism ' fairly enough" (Early Zoroastrianism, p. 125). 

2 " Here, in the interior of China, my * parish ' is constantly 
suffering from floods, caused by a river breaking its banks, and 
making new courses across the country year after year, and the 
people sit by and starve, seeing no means of coping with the 
devastations. We coming from the West know that the trouble 
is not inevitable , that if the people or their Government had 
enough of the spirit of love to make them able to work together 
for the common good, there is engineering knowledge and skill 
adequate for preventive measures. The catastrophes could be 
avoided by men coming more in tune with God." — Where is 
Christ? by an Anglican priest in China, p. 61, 



38 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

such intervention. In cholera and other epidemics 
they flocked to the churches and prayed for their 
removal. It was not till men ceased to regard these 
as visitations of God, and saw that they grew out of 
neglect of sanitary laws, that they set to work 
themselves to remove the causes out of which they 
sprang. Moving along the same way men have 
turned malarial into quite healthy districts, as at 
Panama, whilst in Central Africa great stretches 
of country through which only a few years ago men 
travelled at great peril have now been rendered 
healthy abodes even for Europeans. And it may 
be — we cannot tell — that the great forces of Nature 
which now sometimes bring havoc and ruin may 
be so understood and treated as to bring, not de- 
struction, but enrichment to men. So long as men 
looked for intervention to deliver them from peril, 
they did not seek to deliver themselves. When 
they come to see, as they are now doing, that God 
has made them only a Httle lower than Himself, that 
they may help themselves, and it may be help Him 
in His great purpose, then the great forces of Nature, 
which nov/ sometimes carry havoc and ruin, will be 
yoked to man's chariot, carrying order and blessing 
wherever it goes. And thus, it may be, man will be 
helping to bring things which, from causes we cannot 
at present discover, are not in harmony with His 
Fatherly feeling, into harmony therewith. All 
down the ages men of clear vision have felt that 
there was something in Nature out of harmony with 
the Divine will ; perchance through the co-operation 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 39 

of His children that something may be brought into 
such harmony. It may be that this or something 
akin to this was in St. Paul's thought when he said : 
" The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth 
for the reveaHng of the sons of God. For the 
creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, 
but by reason of Him who subjected it, in hope ; 
because the creation itself also shall be delivered 
from the bondage of corruption into the hberty 
of the glory of the children of God '' :^ which opens 
out a vision of a time when not only man but Nature 
will come into full harmony with the feeling and will 
of God, man, the son, being used by his Father to 
bring about this great consummation. 

Minds filled with traditional ideas may raise the 
objection that in the Old Testament history there 
are instances of intervention from without on 
behalf of the Hebrew race ; but, if they will candidly 
consider the whole matter, they must surely see that 
the writers of that history were poorly equipped for 
the task of judging whether events which seemed 
to be interposition from without were really so, 
since their minds were imaginative rather than 
scientific — after the oriental manner, what they 
felt within they seemed to see with their eyes, and 
so it gained a kind of objectivity, whilst beyond this, 
their knowledge of Nature was so superficial that 
they were not competent judges. No idea of the 
vastness of the universe had dawned upon them ; 
they fancied that the planet called earth on which 

^ Rom. vii. 20-21. 



40 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

they stood was the only one, that it was flat, and 
stationary. They did not know that the earth was 
only one of the vast number which astronomy has 
discovered peopling space, that the earth was a 
globe ever in motion, and that the sun which seemed 
to rise and set was stationary, wliilst it was the earth 
which really rises and sets, or, rather, is ever in 
motion. An example of this is found in the book 
of Joshua (x. 12-14), where we read : 

*' Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when 
the Lord dehvered up the Amorites before the 
children of Israel ; and he said in the sight of Israel : 

Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon ; 

And thou, moon, in the valley of Azalon. 

And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed. 

Until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. 

Is not this written in the book of Jasher ? And the 
Sim stayed in the midst of heaven and hasted not to 
go down about a whole day. And there was no day 
like that before or after ; thus the Lord hearkened 
to the voice of man, for the Lord fought for Israel/' 

Now, to say nothing of the conception of God 
involved in this passage — that He should divert the 
whole order of the universe to give the Uttle nation 
of Israel victory over its enemies — science to-day, 
indeed, any intelligent person, would say that from 
beginning to end the whole conception of the universe 
lying behind this story is out of harmony with fact.^ 

1 Baron von Hugel points out that " men in the past were but 
little alive to the difference between Factual Event and Sym- 
bolical Narrative, and that men in the present are keenly sensi- 
tive to this difference." — Eternal Life, p. 344. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 41 

A people on which science had not even begun to 
throw its reveaUng light was quite unqualified to 
judge whether events which seemed interpositions 
on their behalf were really so. The science of to-day, 
looking at the events they regarded as interpositions 
might be able to show that they were only the work- 
ing out of forces in the original scheme of the imi- 
verse. These ancient views, therefore, which have 
come down to us and gained acceptance because 
included in Scripture, need not and should not be 
regarded as having authority, but only as the views 
of a people at the child-stage, who judged by 
appearance and did not in this respect reach 
reaUty.^ 

Beyond this we do well to judge the Divine method 
in the past by what we see of that method in our 
own day, which clearly is not one of interposition 
from without on behalf of men. If that be the 
method to-day, as science affirms, since the Lord 
changes not, it must have been His method in all 
previous ages. The earUer and less known should 
be judged by the later, and, through the clearer 
light of science, the infinitely better known. '' The 
modem scientific view, just so far as it is loyally 
accepted, frees us from the prejudice of local rela- 
tionships and the narrow-mindedness of temporary 

1 " God had been supposed to give evidence of His existence 
by interfering with the course of Nature from time to time ; 
but, with the growth of a scientific and critical temper of mind, 
the evidence of such interference becomes more and more suspect 
and the inferences themselves less and less credible." — A. Seth 
Pringle-Pattison, in The Spirit^ p. 12. 



42 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

conditions, and brings us out into the broad spaces 
of the peace and wisdom of God/'^ 

Those who stand for intervention from without 
usually confine such intervention to the Hebrew 
race, or, if they extend it, do so only to the British 
people, which they regard as a kind of extension of 
Israel, in whose history they claim to find exam- 
ples. But this is to make God a respecter of nations, 
although it is expressly declared in Scripture that 
He is not a respecter of persons, which seems to 
involve the idea that He is not a respecter of nations. 
But the idea of such limitation of intervention to a 
single nation is quite unworthy of One '' whose 
tender mercies are over all His works," and cannot 
be brought into harmony with the idea of that 
Divine Fatherhood which is more and more coming 
to be seen as the very core of the Evangel of Christ. 

The objection has been raised by some that in 
times of outward difficulty or danger or peril men 
cannot help appeaUng for Divine interposition, 
and they regard this as a kind of instinct which 
justifies and involves the possibility, and even 
probability, and, in some cases, the certainty of 
such interposition on their behalf. It must be 
admitted that such appeal to God is natural, and 
I should be the last to turn any away from it ; 
indeed, it is of great value in quieting and calming 
the mind, and in awakening the feeling that the 
ultimate, if not the temporal issues are in Fatherly 
hands. Such appeal, therefore, will not be with- 

1 Where is Christ ? by an Anglican Priest in China, p. 27. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 43 

out its blessed results. It was so in the case of St. 
Paul, who thrice prayed that his thorn in the 
flesh — a bodily ailment of some kind, probably an 
affection of the eyes — might be removed ; but though 
that thrice-repeated prayer met with no response, 
though the weakness was not removed, though pro- 
bably the apostle had to bear it to the end of his 
days — that is, though there was no outward inter- 
vention on his behalf, there was an inward and spiritual 
response : " My grace is sufficient for thee ; for 
My strength is made perfect in weakness/' Like 
St. Paul, we may rightly respond to this instinct, 
leading us to turn to God in times of outward 
trouble, and to us, as to him, though there may 
not come the deUverance sought, there may come 
what is infinitely better, '' The peace of God which 
passeth all imderstanding, which shall keep our 
hearts and minds by Jesus Christ.'' 

And surely it is often better for us to be granted 
strength to bear than to have the burden removed ; 
better, that is, for character, which, in God's view, 
is the final object of life. And surely a world without 
perpetual intervention on behalf of men is a finer 
sphere for character building than one in which 
every danger or difficulty would be lifted by an arm 
from the sky. 

But, if to pray be an instinct, Uke all instincts, it 
may need to be regulated by the wisdom of Jesus 
and by observation of life. When unregulated it 
may lead to quite wrong conceptions of prayer, 
making us depend on its quantity and vehemence 



44 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

rather than its spirit. When this is the case there 
is forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus corrected 
those who fancied they would be heard for their 
much speaking by the declaration that " your 
Father knoweth what things ye have need of before 
ye ask Him/' and then gave a model prayer whose 
very brevity was a reproof of much speaking in 
prayer, and in which all the requests are for 
spiritual blessings save that for daily bread, which 
some refer to bread for the soul. 

It is sometimes taken for granted that those who 
resort to prayer for the intervention of God in out- 
ward trouble or difficulty stand upon a higher 
spiritual level than those who question whether 
such outward visible aid is given of God. But it 
may be questioned whether appeal to God for such 
interference with the order which He seems to have 
constituted is not rather a defect than a virtue. 
Which is the higher type of child — the one always 
applying to his parent to interfere with the order he 
has fixed in home and school — an order the outcome 
of much thought and affection — or the child who, 
recognising his parent's v/isdom and love, accepts 
the order arranged as the best ? 
j^lxi this matter of prayer it is needful to discern 
whether we are seeking to bring down the will of 
God to our level by importuning Him to grant what 
we ask, or whether, discerning that will as of 
necessity the best, we desire to be lifted up to its 
/ height. 

This question seems to be settled by the attitude 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 45 

of Him who beyond all the sons of men had real 
insight into the nature of God. Instinct led Him 
to pray, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from 
me '' ; knowledge of His Father led Him at once 
to the higher position : '' Nevertheless, not My will, 
but Thine be done/' 

But to return to this question of intervention 
which some desire and which they hold was at one 
time granted, such intervention, I hold, would not be 
for the good of men. It looks as if a Theocracy — a 
direct government by God — would be the very ideal ; 
but in reality it would be far from ideal. It would 
surely prove rather for men's enfeeblement than 
for their development. 

There seems a special significance in that parable 
which opens with these words, which read like a 
vision of Christ of the order of the world ^ : *' For 
the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into 
a far country, who called his own servants and deli- 
vered unto them his goods/' And later on in the 
parable we are told : " After a long time the Lord of 
those servants cometh and reckoneth with them'' 
That seems to give us a glimpse into Christ's idea of 
the relationship of God to men — so far as outward 
control is concerned, He is as one travelling into a 
far country for a long time — leaving to men the 

1 I know full well the danger of pressing the details of parables 
as if they were their vitalities, but I cannot repress the feeling 
that the opening words of this parable do set forth the idea of 
Jesus as to His Father's attitude and relationship to men, an 
attitude of trust expressing itself in giving the fullest liberty 
possible. 



46 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

j management of His affairs, throwing them on their 
own resources. And the parable seems to indicate 
that, though the risk of failure was great, yet the 
plan was successful, for two out of the three servants 
gained by their trading — indeed, they doubled their 
talents — their capital, as we should say. It was a 
great risk, but in the main success followed. 

Now, suppose the man, instead of travelling into 
a far coimtry for a long time, had remained at home 
and guided and controlled the business. There 
would have been less risk — ^there might have been 
larger profits ; but one thing is certain : the servants 
would have had less opportunity for development in 
character ; they would have remained servants, 
and never have become fit to be masters. But, 
thrown on their own responsibiUty, they gained even 
V more in character than they did in goods. 

And here lies, it seems to me, the clue to the 
relationship of God to men. Had that relationship 
been one of perpetual intervention, if at every point 
of difficulty deliverance came from God, life might 
have been much easier, but man would have been 
a much feebler creatiu'e. For the best men have 
been made so not by a rest-and-be-thankful, but 
by a strenuous career. I suppose life is lived at its 
easiest in the South Sea Islands, with abundance of 
fruit and with the softest of climates ; but do the 
natives count for anything in the councils of the 
nations ? The difficulty there is to make them take 
thought for the morrow. And if the Divine purpose 
had been to give men an easy time, then all the 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 47 

world should have had the climate and fraitfulness 
of those islands. If ease was the end, the world is 
wrongly arranged ; but if character be the end, then 
perhaps it is quite rightly arranged. If mere happi- 
ness is the end, the non-intervention of God is a 
mistake ; but, if character be the end, such non- 
intervention is the supremest wisdom. 

There are parents whose one desire for their 
children is freedom from care, and so at every point 
of difficulty they are there to help or deliver. But 
look at those children when they are grown up ! 
And there are parents who love their children quite 
as well, but who, at the proper age, throw them on 
their own resources. Look at those when they are 
grown up ! 

But, though God does not seem to intervene 
from without, He has so constituted the world that, 
whilst evil tends to death, good makes for Ufe. The 
world, and especially the human world, has a moral 
texture, so that the wrong in the long rim is sure to 
fail, and the right to stand. Even generals who are 
inclined to think that only force brings victory, yet 
often speak of the morale of their troops. The very 
use of that word is a tribute to the power which lies 
in the moral realm. 

We shall never understand the method of God till 
we see that we are here, not to have an easy time, 
but to be educated — to be made men and women. 
And no education is worth the name which does 
not include sweat of brow and ache of brain. No 
teacher is worth his salt who solves every problem 



48 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

for his scholars. There is a great significance in 
those two Unes of Miss Guiney : 

'' A short life in the saddle, Lord, 
Not long life by the fire." 

Imagine that through all the history of the world 
God had intervened with deliverance at every point 
of danger or difficulty. The world to-day is very 
far from what we desire, but under such a govern- 
ment men and women would be still in the childhood 
stage. The world is far from being what it should 
be ; but if, as science shows, humanity began very 
low down in the scale, the method of God has not 
been a failure, for, in spite of all our troubles, the 
world probably stands on a higher plane ethically 
and spiritually, certainly scientifically, than it ever 
did before. And, if this be so, the Divine plan of 
non-intervention has justified itself, and, if so, then 
it is surely wiser, instead of craving and crying for 
an arm from the sky, to use the Divine within us — 
the Spirit of God in our hearts — by which we shall 
be led, not, it may be, into the easy, but certainly 
into the right way — the Way Everlasting. 

There are many who say, " The Divine Fatherhood 
is asserted in Scripture — that we readily admit — 
but does God act in a Fatherly way ? Looking out 
over the past history of the world, or looking out 
on the world to-day, do we discover proofs of His 
Fatherly action in relation to men ? In other words, 
is the declaration by Christ of this Fatherhood 
ratified by the facts of history in the past or of the 
world to-day? Such persons say, and they are 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 49 

justified in saying, that declarations count for 
little unless ratified by facts. They say, after all, 
the final appeal is to facts, or, as our common pro- 
verb puts it, '* Actions speak louder than words/' 
And I at once admit that if the world, especially the 
world of humanity, does not show signs of God's 
Fatherly relationship, then the mere declaration 
of it in Scripture, falls to the ground like a house 
without foundation. I admit that the final appeal 
here, as everj^where, is to facts. If the facts do not 
support the declaration, then we must sorrowfully 
but certainly give it up. 

There have been firm believers in God, even in His 
Fatherhood, who have been puzzled and even 
bewildered by His attitude to the w^orld. Thomas 
Carlyle asked concerning God, " Why doesn't He 
do something ? '' And Theodore Parker used to 
say, '* God is not in a hurry, but I am.'' And 
Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, whom Dr. Hanna, 
the editor of his letters, described to me as the 
holiest man he had ever known, once spoke to his 
friend Principal Shairp, of the " awful silence of 
God ; how it sometimes became oppressive, and 
the heart longed to hear, in answer to its cry, some 
audible voice." And thousands, especially in the 
awful times through which the world has been and 
is still passing, have asked, or, if they have not 
asked, have thought, '' Why doesn't God interfere in 
human affairs to stop the evil and to help the good? " ^ 

^ " God is in the order of Nature as a whole, not specifically 
in gaps." — C. W. Emmet, in The Spirit, p. 219. 

4 



50 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

That feeling is very widespread to-day. Indeed, it 
is that which makes it so hard for many to hold their 
faith in this Fatherhood of God. It is not a fancied 
but a real difficulty, and I will set forth how I have 
been able, amid all the welter of recent years, to 
hold my faith in this Fatherhood. 

Let me first call your attention to certain things which 
should form a part of the scene if we are rightly to 
judge KDhether God really cares for men. We are apt 
to judge by what God does not do, and to lose sight 
of what He is already doing. With ou.r eyes on the 
outlook for the ^^^r ^ordinary, we are apt to lose sight 
of the ordinary working of God ; just as children 
fail to see proofs of their parents' love in the every- 
day provision for their lives, and only see such love 
in special gifts on special occasions. For a right 
estimate of any matter, we must bring into account 
not only the extraordinary but the ordinary. 

I suppose most would acknowledge that a certain 
Fatherliness is shown in the world where man is 
placed by its provision for his needs. It does not 
matter, for our present purpose, how that world 
came to be what it is — ^nor how many ages it took — 
that is only a matter of method. Here is the 
world on which we tread, the air we bieathe, the 
light by which we see. Here is the day for work and 
the night for rest. And on all these we can depend. 
We have never to ask will there be earth, air, Hght, 
day, or night ? Beyond these, in the world, there 
Ues the capacity for growth, so that seed put therein 
brings forth harvests for food. The earthy if rightly 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 51 

used, is capable of bringing forth enough for all 
the people that are bom into it. And then there is 
not only this power of increase in the world to-day, 
but there is laid up for us under the earth vast stores 
of heat — the sunlight of ages ago, which first gave 
birth to the forests and then, by an age-long process, 
became coal. Then, too, there are precious and 
other metals and stones, the outcome and result 
of great cataclysms in the past. These and many 
more such things which came into being when there 
were few or none to use and profit by them, have come 
down as a precious legacy to us. And so we are 
provided, among other things, with much of our 
light and heat to-day. Whilst beyond all these 
necessary things, without which we could not live, 
there is the beauty of the world, of flower, shrub, 
tree, mountain, valley, lake, river — the beauty of 
the skies, the modest flush of the sunrise, the bolder 
glory of the sunset, by which life is enriched and 
uplifted. 

And then, beyond these, there is the mind of man 
by which all these are utilised, developed, enjoyed. 
It matters not how mind came — ^by conferment 
or by slow development — here is mind, without 
which all would be in vain. 

And then, beyond this, again, there is what in 
common phrase we call the heart, which knits us 
together in families, societies, nations — love, the 
greatest, most vital of all our endowments. 

Now, if we look at these things which I have 
mentioned, and many other things which might be, 



52 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

but^^whichl^^Ij^have not mentioned, surely it must 
be admitted that, as a whole, the world spells the 
word *' good/' and that '' good '' points to care in 
the source from which it has come. 

" Should we not be led to admire and revere 
increasingly the wonder of it all, as there grows upon 
us the sense of the quietness and gentleness, the 
foresight and the infinite patience of the Being of 
beings, who will never obtrude His presence and 
action upon us, just because He would help us to be 
our[own, fnot dead, but living, and would have us 
rise^with Him to the highest things/' ^ 

Of course, on this earthly scene there are ugly 
things — upheavings of land we call earthquakes, 
upheavings of the sea we call storms, stirrings of 
the air we call simooms or siroccos, to which I have 
already referred, and these sometimes work terrible 
havoc with human lives. Yes, but they are not 
the rule, they are the exception — and the havoc of 
human life would be vastly less if men would not 
live in volcanic districts, or if they would not put 
to sea when all indications point to storms. For 
aught we know, these things may be needful — they 
may serve some great and good purpose. Anyway, 
they are the exceptional, not the usual. And even 
these exceptional things may be due to some- 
thing in the material of the universe which, for 
some reason we cannot now quite perceive, is 
beyond the reach of the Great Father's heart. The 
universe may possibly be like the veined marble 

1 Where is Christ? by an Anglican Priest in China, p. 59. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 53 

which renders it impossible for the sculptor to 
produce just the statue which rises before his 
imagination and which he would like to see actualised. 
The universe, it may be, is not yet such as the Father 
desires it to be — that is, in harmony with the deepest 
in his heart — and wliich, perhaps, through the aid 
of His children it may gradually be brought to be. 

And when we come to the human realm there 
are sights which distress our hearts and make 
us ask, *' Does God really care for men ? " Disease 
and poverty especially arouse this question. But in 
this realm the blame must be laid at the right door. 
I make bold to say that disease is not from God, but 
from man. More and more disease is being traced 
to immoral causes, not, of course, always in the 
actual sufferers, but often in the wrongdoing of 
ancestors. One of the most distinguished of modem 
surgeons declared that he could discover germs 
of disease in the teeth of children arising from im- 
morality three or four generations earlier. Travel- 
ling once with a consulting physician, I remarked 
that probably he Vv^ould not agree with me when I said 
that a very great proportion of disease was due to 
immoral causes. He repUed that, in his judgment, 
95 per cent, of disease had such a cause. Dr. R. W. 
Mackenna says : 

" It will be a good day for England when every 
father asks the suitor for his daughter's hand, not 
what his bank balance is, but whether his blood is 
clean ; for more women have been ruined in health 
and more children doomed to a heritage of suffering 



54 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

through the neglect of this pertinent but not imper- 
tinent question than Nero ever butchered or Herod's 
soldiers slew. Of old it was said : ' The fathers 
have eaten sour grapes and the teeth of the children 
are set on edge ' ; and the proverb still holds true/' ^ 

Surely, therefore, the blame should be laid on its 
true cause, which is not in God, but in men. If 
it were possible to root out immorality, in a few 
generations we should be making some approach 
to a healthy race. 

In this connection it may be well to call attention 
to that active Divine energy which is always battling 
with disease, even when it is due to men's perverted 
courses. Perhaps the most wonderful sign of the 
Divine beneficence is to be found in that vis medicatrix 
naturcBy which, beyond any skill or remedies of the 
physician, is the great healer, and without which 
all his efforts would utterly fail. Practically all 
that the wise physician of to-day even attempts to 
do is to furnish the conditions under which this 
great healing force may carry on its work. This 
force seems to be active in every realm — ^vegetable, 
animal, human. Damage a plant or shrub or tree, 
and presently this healing force will begin and carry 
on its work of restoration. Let an animal be 
damaged in body by accident or by the sport of 
man, and, if the damage is not too great, the animal's 
instinct will lead it to lie in such a position that the 
healing may go forward and in many cases be nearly 

1 The Adventure of Life, by R. W. Mackenna, M.A., M.D., 

p. I20. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 55 

or quite completed. And in the human realm rest 
and quietness are often alone needed for this healing 
force to lead the body back to health. I know of 
nothing which seems so suggestive of care in the 
source of all things. 

Then, too, poverty, rightly regarded, must be 
traced, not to God, but to man. It is not that the 
Divine supplies are inadequate. The earth is 
capable of providing for the needs of all its in- 
habitants. The board of God is amply spread, but 
the distribution by men leaves much to be desired. 
Overmuch — more than they can use or enjoy — is 
gathered by some, and too little, less than they need, 
by others. 

It might be well for us to face the fact — for 
fact it is— that God is the great Provider, but 
that men are left to be the distributors of His 
provisions. Probably there never has been a 
period in which His earth did not bring forth, or 
was not capable of bringing forth, sufficient for 
all the dwellers upon its surface. But again and 
again, though the supply has been ample, the 
distribution has been at fault — that is, men, not 
God, have been at fault either through their 
ignorance or their selfishness. The realisation 
of this would clear many a shadow from the face 
of God. 

I was once visiting the mansion of one of the 
wealthiest men in England — ^fuU to overflowing 
with lovely objects. I said to its owner : '' Your 
house is full of lovely things ; it would take a long 



56 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

time to examine them all." He replied, " You 
think God has given me too much, and you too 
little ? '' I said, '' I am quite content with my little, 
but don't bring God into the matter of your abun- 
dance, for He has nothing to do with it/' Provi- 
sion is of God, distribution is of men. Therefore, if 
the distribution is faulty — which it certainly is — let 
men bear the blame. 

In judging of such questions, if the optimist 
overlooks the dark spots in the picture — which he 
often does — the pessimist, who is most in evidence 
to-day, sees all through blackened spectacles. God 
forbid that I should say one word to put out of sight 
the suffering of the world, or to cause any to cease 
from grappling with it. But, at the same time, it is 
quite ea^y to exaggerate that suffering. It has, for 
example, been shown to me by both doctors and 
nurses that often when a patient seems to be 
suffering an agony of pain he is actually uncon- 
scious of it, so that the watchers by the bedside, 
through their sympathy for him, are suffering far 
more. 

George Crabbe and Oliver Goldsmith both painted 
the same dwellers in villages in their poems, but 
Crabbe' s pictures are of almost un alleviated misery, 
whilst Goldsmith's reveal much simple joy under 
hard conditions. And the reason for the difference 
is that Crabbe saw only the external, whilst 
Goldsmith saw by the hght of his own ex- 
perience the internal, the simple joy which often 
lay beneath. 



HIS NON-INTERVENTION 57 

Klaus Groth probably hits the mark when he says : 

** Thou must not 
Condemn as worthless what thou dost not know. 
For every station has a world its own , 
And each one's life is moulded to its form. 
Survey it from without and all within 
Looks cold and lifeless to thine eye, although 
Within the life is throbbing as before. 
And each has got his share of grief and joy. 
For empty through the world no heart may go. 

The peasant, too, has got his little world — 
He that would see it must have eye to see — 
And has it then grown sadder than of old ? 
Let him but take a closer, surer look ; 
Then he will see this world is still as true. 
As happy, and as homely, and as gay 
As all the fairest tales that e'er were told." ^ 

But, if all this be admitted, this is no argument 
for leaving any class unprovided with the conditions 
which will enable its members to reach any position, 
however lofty, for which their ability fits them. To 
reach this state of things, to which all right-hearted 
men should be helpers, very much ground has yet 
to be travelled. 

Dr. Wicksteed says : 

*' It is none other than the great monist Plotinus 
himself who assures us that evil is not here in order 
to conduce to the perfection of the universe ; on 
the contrary, it is due to the imperfection inherent 
in a graded imiverse. But nowhere is the trans- 
cendent might of good more triumphantly displayed 
than in its power to extract some good out of every 

1 The Poets and Peoples of Foreign Lands, by J. W. Crombie,/^ 

p. 112. 



58 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

evil. If we understood this (as I am convinced we 
may) to mean that we can make every evil yield 
some specific good of its own, we ^hall have a creed 
that will enable us to face every evil thing with a 
high heart and to welcome with ungrudging thank- 
fulness every good, great or small, that it can be 
forced to yield, though all the time we are trying 
utterly to destroy evil/' ^ 

Or, as Whittier puts it in his poem : 

" The clouds, which rise with thunder, slake 

Our thirsty souls with rain ; 
The blow most dreaded falls to break 

From off our limbs a chain ; 
And wrongs of man to man but make / 
\« The love of God more plain. ..^ 

As through the shadowy lens of even 

The eye looks farthest into heaven 
On gleams of star and depths of blue 

The glaring sunshine never knew I *' 

1 Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy, pp. 251-2. 



II 

UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 

Probably the greatest difficulty felt by many in 
realising the perfect Fatherhood of God is the sight 
which certain parts of Nature present as '' red in 
tooth and claw with ravine/' This at first sight 
seems to indicate that there are parts of His creation 
to which His Fatherly feeling does not extend. I 
confess that this to me in past days has been the 
greatest hindrance to confidence in His Fatherly 
feeUng. I remember looking out, one lovely summer 
day, on my little lawn and seeing a thrush hopping 
about in a state of perfect happiness. The sight was 
beautiful, but presently I noticed the thrush strike 
his beak into the grass and pull out and swallow a 
worm. And the beauty died out of the scene. For, 
when all has been said in mitigation — that, unlike 
the human, the worm did not live in constant fear 
of attack, that, when it came, its lower vitality 
rendered the attack less painful, and that all was 
soon over — yet this very order of things seems 
to miUtate against that perfect Fatherhood which 
Jesus discerned. 

I found some relief in the idea that, though there 

69 



60 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

was the Divine action on Nature, yet it could not 
accomplish all that it desired on account of the 
very nature of what we call ''matter " — that there 
might be in Nature some resisting, or, at least, 
some lack of response to the Divine action. That 
view may be held without dropping into the old 
Manichean idea that matter is essentially evil. 
Matter has and can have no moral quahty, even 
when the latest view of matter taken by science is 
accepted that ranks it near to the spiritual. But 
the view may perhaps still be held that Nature is 
not at present all that God would desire because of 
an inherent lack of response to the Divine action. 
This finds strong support in Bergson, who says : 

" The impetus of life of which we are speaking 
consists in a need of creation. ... It cannot create 
absolutely, because it is confronted with matter. . . . 
But it seizes upon this matter and strives to 
introduce into it the largest possible amount of 
indetermination and liberty. But we must take 
into account, retrogressions, arrests, accidents of 
every kind. . . . Hence a discord, striking and 
terrible, but for which the original principle of Life 
must not be held responsible.'' ^ 

This suggests that possibly the present is not the 
ultimate order, but a part of the groaning and 
travailing in pain of the creation of which St. Paul 
speaks and which points to a final order of a vastly 
higher and more gracious kind. Of such a higher, 
ultimate order there are foregleams even in the 

1 Creative Evolution, chap. iii. 



UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 61 

Hebrew prophets of the long ago. In both the first 
and second Isaiahs there are vivid pictures of the 
time when the conflict between different species of 
animals shall cease, when the ravening and over- 
throwing instinct which leads to continual conflict 
shall pass, and, instead of Nature red in tooth and 
claw with ravine, the various animals shall form 
a happy family, enjoying each other's society, and 
not destructive, but helpful to each other. 

It may be said, and will probably be said by some, 
that this is only the dreaming of a prophet, or, as 
we should now say, of a poet, and not a reasoned 
forecast of science. And there are minds which 
regard the poet only as a dreamer of dreams and 
not as a foreseer of realities. They know little of 
the poets who think in this way. It would be easy, 
from the words of such men as Goethe, Blake, 
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning to show that 
in their visions they foresaw what has since become 
actual fact ^ ; whilst in the writings of Roger Bacon 
— a writer of prose, but with much of the spirit of 
the poet — there is to be formd, as I will show in a 
later chapter, an actual forecast in the thirteenth 
of what has come to pass in the twentieth century. 

In his exposition of the book of Isaiah Sir George 
Adam Smith paints a picture of scenes, which may 
be seen in certain lands, approaching to this ideal : 

1 Professor Wildon Carr in his book, The Principle of Rela- 
tivity, says : "It will be found, as it has always been found, 
that the poets, with their mythical interpretations, and the 
philosophers with their speculative hypotheses, have led the way 
in this new advance." 



62 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

'' But surely there is no genial man who has 
watched the varied forms of life that sport on the 
southern seashore, who will not sympathise with 
the prophet in his joyous vision. Upon a warm 
spring day in Palestine, to sit upon the grass beside 
some old dyke or ruin with its face to the south 
is indeed to obtain a rapturous view of the wealth 
of life with which the bountiful God has blessed and 
made merry man's dwelling-place. How the lizards 
come and go among the grey stones, and flash like 
jewels in the dust ! And the timid snake rippling 
quickly past through the grass, and the leisurely 
tortoise with his shining back, and the chameleon, 
shivering into new colour as he passes from twig to 
stone and stone to straw — all the air the while alive 
with the music of the cricket and the bee ! You 
feel that the ideal is not to destroy these pretty things 
as vermin. What a loss of colour the lizards alone 
would imply ! . . . the ideal is to bring them into 
sympathy with ourselves, to make pets of them and 
playthings for children, who indeed stretch out their 
hands in joy to the pretty toys. Why should we 
need to fight with or destroy any of the happy life 
the Lord has created ? Why have we this loathing 
to it, and need to defend ourselves from it, when 
there is so much suffering we could cure, and so 
much childUkeness we could amuse, and be amused 
by, and yet it will not let us near/'" 

The alienation, leading to conflict, between man 
and certain animals, science itself, in the person of 
Charles Darwin, traces to the wrong conduct of 
man. He says : 

" It deserves notice that at an extremely ancient 
period, when man first entered any coimtry the 
animals living there would have felt no instinctive 



UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 63 

or inherited fear of him, and would consequently 
have been tamed far more easily than at present. 
Quadrupeds and birds which have seldom been 
disturbed by man dread him no more than do 
English birds the cows or horses grazing in the 
field/'i 

I may, perhaps, be permitted to quote here a 
letter from a lady friend who has thought long and 
deeply on this subject ; 

'' The problem v/ith which you are dealing — 
destructiveness in Nature, the strife, the apparent 
indifference and cruelty — is being acutely felt at 
this hour. In speaking to a large gathering of men 
last summer I tried to deal with this, and was 
surprised by the warmth of their response. I had 
been reading, a few days previously, the report of 
a speech in the House of Commons, in which a 
militant member declared there must always be 
war, for, said he. Nature was full of strife — Nature 
was war. I had reaUsed that the character of God, 
not only the God of the Bible, but of Nature, must 
be cleared of this charge before we can consistently 
denounce war among men. I spoke from the full 
assurance of my own heart when I bade them take 
their children to the bluebell glades of Kew and see 
there, in that vision of loveliness, the unthwarted 
will of their Father in heaven. But when, I told 
them, I had recently heard cries of anguish in my 
Uttle garden, and, looking out, saw a baby thrush 
in the jaws of a cat, and found myself too late to 
save aught but a Uttle bundle of feathers ; when 
I saw the poignant grief of the father and mother 
thrushes whose tenderest care had been unavailing 

1 Darwin's Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestica- 
tion, 



64 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

to shield their wee song-life, then I dared to say it 
is not the will of my Father that one of these 
little ones should perish.' Something here is 
hindering the will of God. This is not in harmony 
with the heart of the Father ; this is not His 
ultimate will. And must not His ultimate be also 
His primal will ? '' 

It is now beginning to be questioned whether 
essentially Nature is so red in tooth and claw with 
ravine as men have believed. It is true that 
J. H. Fabre, in Insect Life, says that brigandage is 
the law in the struggle among living things, but 
Forel proves that the war-making instinct is not 
fundamental. This, he says, does not exist in the 
early stages of ant life. Putting together newly 
hatched ants belonging to three different species, 
Forel obtained a mixed ant community whose 
members lived in perfect harmony. The only 
primitive instinct of newly-hatched ants is that for 
domestic work and the care of larvae ; not until 
later do they realise that they are members of a 
single ant community, on behalf of which they have 
to fight. 

But what is still more surprising is that the 
intensity of the warrior instinct is distinctly pro- 
portional to the size of the collectivity. Two ants 
of enemy species meeting at a distance from their 
respective nests, or from their own folk, will avoid 
one another and run away in opposite directions. 
Even if you come across the armies in full combat, 
and you remove from their ranks an ant belonging 



UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 65 

to either side and shut the two in a small box they 
will do one another no harm. If, instead of taking 
merely two, you shut up a moderate number from 
either side within a narrow space, they will fight 
half-heartedly for a while, but soon cease to struggle, 
and often end by making friends. In such circum- 
stances they will never resume the struggle. But 
put these same ants back among the fighting 
forces of their respective sides, and separate them 
by a reasonable distance, so that they might Uve 
at peace, and you will see them return to the 
attack.^ 

This seems to suggest that the fighting instinct 
in the ant, and it may be in other creatures, is not 
so deep as is usually believed. It may be to some 
extent a case of evil communications corrupting 
good manners. 

It is the conviction of many in our day that 
even man, the highest in the scale, is only in process 
of development, and that the man of the future will 
far excel the man of to-day. That is the note which 
runs through two of the latest poems of Tennyson. 
In " The Dawn '' he speaks of Babylon as a child 
new bom, and of London and Paris, and all the rest, 
as yet but in leading-strings, and he closes with the 
words : 

" Ah ! what will our children be — 
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away ? *' 

And in " The Making of Man '' : 

1 The Forerunners, by Romain RoUand, pp. 179-80, 

s 



66 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

" Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ? 
All about him shadow still, but while the races flower and 

fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade, 
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in 

choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker I ' It is finish' d. Man is made ! ' " 

The same note runs through that noble hymn 
of John Addington Symonds, which is finding ever 
greater favour in the Churches : 

" These things shall be ! a loftier race 
Than ere the world has known shall rise, 
With flame of freedom in their souls 
And light of knowledge in their eyes. 

They shall be gentle, brave, and strong 
To spill no drop of blood, but dare 
All that may plant man's lordship firm 
On earth, and fire, and sea, and air. 

Nation with nation, land with land. 
Unarmed shall live as comrades free ; 
In every heart and brain shall throb 
The pulse of one fraternity. 

Man shall love man with heart as pure 
And fervent as the young-eyed throng 
Who chant their heavenly psalms before 
God's face with undiscordant song. 

New arts shall bloom of loftier mould, 
And mightier music thrill the skies. 
And every life shall be a song, 
V^en all the earth is paradise. 

There shall be no more sin, nor shame. 
Though pain and passion may not die ; 
For man shall be at one with God 
In bonds of firm necessity." 

And if man, the highest, is destined to rise still 



UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 67 

higher ; if his progress up from low and slow 
beginnings to his present position is only a part of 
the journey he is destined to travel in the future, 
how much more may be expected of creatures far 
lower in the scale of life ? It may be that on the 
largest scale the Pauline word may yet be fulfilled — 
" the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth 
for the manifestation of the sons of God/' 

It may be objected that the vista opened here 
points straight to vegetarianism, which is regarded 
by some as the way taken by ill-balanced minds. 
But, supposing it does point to vegetarianism, is 
the vision so very repellent ? I do not practise 
vegetarianism myself, and so condemn myself in 
that which I allow ; but I see clearly enough that 
there are many things to be said in its favour. 
Certainly it is a pleasanter thing to feel that we are 
nourished by fruit taken from the tree, vegetables 
cut from the stock, and roots lifted from the ground, 
than by meat which involves the destruction of 
animals which in life we admire. Possibly a 
vegetable and fruit diet may be more conducive to 
health. Certainly many physicians now recom- 
mend a greater reliance on it, and less on animal 
food. It may be if we lived only on the fruits of 
the earth certain diseases would be less frequent and 
some might even disappear. Possibly we British 
folk might be less pugnacious if our bodies were 
not so largely nourished by animal food. Epssibly 
the life of the spirit might be increased by the less 
stimulating and exciting food grown in garden or 



68 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

field. It may be that the far more reUgious spirit 
observable in India, is due, not only as some 
would say, to the environment of Indian lives, to 
the stupendous scenery and great natural forces of 
their land awakening the sense of awe which is 
akin to religion, but to the avoidance of all animal 
food and the use of only the products of the earth. 
When reliance is placed entirely on such food men 
cannot rightly be regarded as taking a quite excep- 
tional and erratic course, since a great part of the 
human race never permits a single particle of 
animal food to cross its lips. Whilst, if it be said 
that strength for heavy labour could not be 
drawn from a vegetable diet, it may be reflected that 
some of the strongest animals, such as the horse, 
the buffalo, or the elephant, draw their strength 
entirely from the products of the groimd. 

To-day vegetarianism may be regarded as an 
oddity of Ufe ; to-morrow it may be regarded 
as the normal way. A century ago an abstainer 
from alcohol was frequently the butt for ridicule ; 
to-day the ridicule has ceased, and the United 
States, with its huge population, is by law abstinent, 
save where foreign embassies are located whose 
houses are regarded as a part of the countries they 
represent, and where their home customs are 
allowed to prevail. 

Humanity cannot rightly be regarded as having 
reached perfection either in its fashions or customs 
or diet. Certainly, the diet v/hich does not involve 
destruction or cruelty to animal hfe is far the more 



UNFATHERLY ELEMENTS IN NATURE 69 

delightful to contemplate. A greengrocer's or 
fruiterer's shop presents a far more attractive 
picture than the butcher's, especially in England, 
where the meat is displayed in a way to remind of 
the slaughterhouse and its processes. In France 
and Italy, and probably in other lands, the eye is 
not offended or the heart pained by the sight of the 
carcases of animals bearing the marks of the 
slaughterer's hand : an example which might well 
be followed in this country. 

Even those who may not be prepared to accept 
the idea of a time when the strife among animals 
shall give place to a happy relationship may yet 
be ready to think of a time when the greater cami- 
vora shall cease to exist on the earth, even as the 
monsters of the slime, huge in size and terrible 
in their fierceness, which roamed the world of a 
far-off prehistoric time, have quite ceased to be, 
leaving no representatives, save, perhaps, in such 
animals as the rhinoceros or the alligator, or, in 
bulk, the elephant on land and the whale in the sea. 

But the world would be a far less interesting place 
to live in if all the animals with any fierceness of 
nature were brought to an end. Their preservation, 
with natures somewhat changed, allowing of less 
dangerous relationships with men, presents a far 
more interesting prospect, by keeping for us a far 
more diversified world. This seems at present too 
great a hope to be entertained, but it is well some- 
times to remember the poet Clough's pregnant Une : 

" If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars." 



Ill 

CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 

Here I might have left the subject, but that I 
know, both from my own experience in the past and 
from observation of others, that there is something 
else which makes faith in the perfect Fatherhood of 
God difficult. It is that in the Gospels there are 
words about God, even said to be from the lips of 
Christ, which, to many minds, do not seem consistent 
with this perfect Fatherhood — ^that is, God is said 
to do things out of harmony with the perfect love 
of a perfect Father — things which even an earthly 
father worthy of the name would not do to his 
children. In these God does not seem to carry 
out the precepts of Christ which He laid on us. 

I refer to such words as those which close the 
parable of the Pounds : *' Those Mine enemies, who 
would not that I should reign over them, bring 
hither and slay them before Me,'' together with 
other words of a like kind scattered over the pages 
of the Gospels, especially that of St. Matthew, chiefly 
in the endings of parables. 

I remember how such passages troubled me when 
I was quite a child — how they darkened many hours 

70 



CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 71 

of my life, how they led to fear rather than love of 
God. In those days people were obliged to keep 
their religious difficulties to themselves, since to 
express them often brought the charge of unbeUef 
and even wickedness. Let me give an illustration 
of this recorded in Sir J. T. Coleridge's Memoir of 
John Keble. About the time to which I have been 
referring the son of the author of that memoir — 
who afterwards became a well-known judge — was 
telling Mr. Keble of the difficulties he felt on the 
question of the inspiration of the Scriptures, which 
he said were widely felt, and that it seemed very 
desirable that some competent person should deal 
with this question. Mr. Keble put the question 
aside as long as he could, but, upon being pressed 
by Mr. Coleridge, he replied that *' most of those who 
had difficulties of this kind were too wicked to be 
reasoned with," That reply was the result either of 
ignorance of the men of that time, or of a great 
lack of charity. As a matter of fact, those with 
such doubts are often the most keenly conscientious, 
who will not say what they do not believe. Indeed, 
it is often such persons who lead on to a purer and 
less superstitious faith. In my own case, when 
difficulties arose as I read the Scriptures, there was 
no one to whom I could refer them. The pulpit 
of that tim.e went its dreary round of religious 
platitudes, and never met the problems seething in 
many minds, especially among the young. 

And one of these difficulties in my ovvm case was 
that, whilst in the Gospels God was declared to be 



72 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

a perfect Father, who loved the world, who was 
indeed called Love itself, yet there were passages in 
which He was described as acting in a very unf atherly 
— that is, an unforgiving — way. The difficulty I felt 
then many now feel. Indeed, no one reading the 
Gospels with an open mind can fail to see the con- 
trast thus presented between the picture of God in 
the Sermon on the Mount, which draws and holds 
our hearts, and some passages in certain of the 
parables of Christ. I refer not only to the parable 
of the Pounds, but to others of a like type contained 
in the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, 
which all end with some terrible sentence of age-long 
punishment for the unfaithful — a punishment with 
no ray of hope, no assurance of forgiveness, even if 
repentance sprang up in their hearts when under- 
going such punishment. 

Let me now do what I can to throw light upon 
this difficulty, which must be felt by thoughtful 
minds. And, first, let me remark that all these parables 
are expressed in Oriental terms — in other words, they 
reach us through Eastern minds. And the East is 
not precise and careful in its expressions as is the 
West. Eastern minds work through the imagina- 
tion far more than do Western. This leads to an 
exaggerated kind of utterance — understood by 
Easterns, but not easily understood by Westerns. 
This should always be remembered as we read the 
Scriptures or any oriental book. But this has been 
often quite*^ overlooked by expositors of Scripture, 
to our great harm and loss. I once said to a Pro- 



CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 73 

fessor of New Testament Exegesis, that " no man 
was fit to be an expositor of Scripture who had not 
a touch of poetry in his nature to enable him to 
understand the oriental, which is essentially a 
poetical mind,'' to which he gave his full assent. 
But from another Professor — a Professor of Theology 
— to whom I said that the effort of the commentator 
should be to understand the oriental mind so as to 
give it its proper equivalent in Western language, 
I could get no assent. From the latter type we get 
writings which misrepresent the original record. " A 
prosaic treatment of poetry has been a constant 
bane of theology." 

Then let me remark that the words which seem to 
present God in an unfatherly light — which, indeed, 
present Him rather as a Sultan than as a Father — are 
found in parables. And parables, seemingly the 
easiest, are really the hardest of the words of Jesus 
to understand. They are pictures at which we look 
and, seeing, fancy we understand. The difficulty 
with the parable is to discern what is its essential 
teaching and what is the mere adorning of that 
teaching — what it was actually meant to teach, and 
what was only to arrest the hearer's attention. 

Most people would say, as St. Peter probably 
did, that the hardest parts of the New Testament 
to imderstand are the arguments of St. Paul. And 
they seem so. But in reality the hardest are the 
parables, and for the reason I have given — that we 
are never quite sure what in them is vital and what 
is ornamental. It may be that the words which 



74 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

trouble us in some of the parables are only of the 
ornamental kind. And that this is likely will be 
seen from another consideration : that the parables in 
which these difficulties about God occur are of what is 
now called an apocalyptic kind — that is, of a kind 
which refer rather to another world than to this 
one.^ The age in which our Lord did His work 
was flooded with this apocalyptic literature. The 
period between the close of the Old and the opening 
of the New Testament era — when the prophets 
had ceased to speak, when, indeed. Prophecy — that 
is, what we should call preaching — ^by such men 
as Isaiah, Amos, Malachi — had ceased, there 
sprang up apocalyptic writers who did not, like the 
prophets, so much try to show men their present 
duty as to lift the veil from the unseen world or to 
indicate what would happen on the earth. That 
was a period of almost unbroken adversity to 
Israel, when trouble followed hard upon trouble, 
and no sign of deliverance appeared on the human 
plane. It is not strange, therefore, that, to sustain 
the hearts of the people, writers arose pointing to 
coming deliverance from heaven ; no hope being seen 
in the human realm, men were pointed to a higher 

1 Father Tyrrell, in his book Christianity at the Cross Roads, 
seems to me to give the word *' apocalyptic " a wider meaning, 
and makes it stand for the theologic, as distinguished from the 
ethical, element in Scripture. That is an undue extension of 
this word. I use it as referring only to all which is declared to 
be coming on the earth, or to what will be in the next world : 
such things as are presented in certain parts of the book of 
Daniel in the Old Testament, and the Revelation of St. John 
in the New. 



CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 75 

one. This probably is how the vast apocalyptic 
literature arose with which this period was flooded. 

We see the beginning of this in the book of Daniel 
— the favourite book of the Millenarians, and those 
who profess to tell us how long the world is going 
to last. Within my own memory, how many pre- 
dictions of the end of the world have been put forth, 
most of them founded on the book of Daniel ? I 
have lived through many ends of the world as pre- 
dicted by these folk ! But, nothing daunted, they 
go on predicting — to the great harm of the religion 
with which they connect their predictions. 

But Daniel was only one of a vast company who, 
as the men of that age thought, could lift the veil 
and show what would befall the earth. The actual 
writers of the apocalyptic books are unknown, 
but in order to give their writings authority they 
were named after men famed in the earlier history 
of Israel — such as Enoch, Isaiah, Moses, Solomon, 
and the twelve Patriarchs. These apocalyptic 
books had a great vogue, and to a large extent put 
out of sight the far greater works of the prophets 
of the Old Testament. The minds of the people 
were full of them, and they provided as it were an 
idiom, a way of thinking, in which the thoughts — 
certainly the religious thoughts — of the people of 
our Lord's age naturally ran. We cannot rightly 
imderstand the parables of Christ into which these 
final things are introduced without remembering 
this, and especially remembering that in this 
apocalyptic literature God figured rather as an 



76 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Eastern despot or Sultan than as the Father whom 
Christ revealed. Therefore, it is not surprising that 
certain parables are framed, as it were, in this apoca- 
lyptic way, and that in them God appears rather as 
Despot than as Father. The essential teaching of 
these parables can be received and the incidental 
references of a despotic kind can be dropped. 

I have been going over such parables, and I see 
that their essential teaching can practically all be 
preserved without the words of doom at their close 
— which seem out of harmony with the Fatherhood 
and f orgivingness of God declared in the unparabolic 
— that is, the direct teaching of Jesus. 

Indeed, it is not at all imlikely that the apocalyptic 
elements in these parables were not from the lips 
of Christ at all, but were after-additions by the 
compilers or editors or later copjdsts of the Gospels. 
We must remember that Jesus made no kind of 
provision for the preservation of His words — that 
He never promised the world any record. He only 
promised the Spirit as the Guide to truth — that is, 
to truth in a imiversal sense. In those days there 
were no reporters or shorthand writers. The words 
of Christ fell into the memories of those who heard 
Him speak, and they handed on reports to other 
memories; and it was not till after two or three genera- 
tions that the Gospels got into form and were written 
down. And then, too, in those early days men did 
not trouble much about accuracy in ascriptions 
of authorship of books or of pieces quoted in 
them. To-day it is regarded as an offence to quote 



CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 77 

another writer without acknowledgment, or without 
putting quotation marks against the extract ; but 
in those days, and until a century or so ago, there 
was great carelessness about such matters. I have 
no doubt myself that many things have thus been 
attributed to Christ that He never said. I cannot 
imagine the lips which said " Love your enemies," 
sajdng '' And those Mine enemies that would not 
that I should reign over them, bring hither and 
slay them before Me ! '' ^ 

And then, it should be remembered that a right rule 
is to interpret the difficult by the plain, not the plain 
by the difficult. The right way is to interpret the 
parabolic by the didactic — the picture-writing by 
the clear declarations of Christ. We are quite safe 
in taking our stand on the definite word of Christ 
which tells of the perfection of God, and which bids 
us address our prayers to " Our Father which is in 
heaven,'' and to forgive, not to slay, our enemies. 

And then, too, those plain and beautiful precepts of 
the Sermon on the Mount are approved by our con^ 
science. They '' find us," as Coleridge used to say ; 
but the terrible words which close some of the 

1 The passages which seem to point to everlasting punishment 
" are all derived from the first Gospel, and, if there is a conclusion 
to which the results of recent Gospel criticism point, it is that 
sayings in the first Gospel, unsupported by the other Synoptists, 
are very frequently coloured by the doctrinal beliefs or ecclesias- 
tical arrangements of the Judaeo -Christian Church at the end of 
the first century a.d. These passages may well be ' ecclesiastical 
additions,' or, at least, they are in all probability much modified 
by the unconscious influence of ecclesiastical tradition." — Con* 
science and Christ, by Hastings Rashdall, pp. 298-9. 



78 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

parables — surely due, not to the mind and heart of 
Christ, but to the apocalyptic way of that age — 
cause us trouble, disturb and darken our hearts. 
They may well, therefore, be disregarded as due not 
to Christ but to the spirit of that age. 

I was once visiting a very thoughtful friend, 
deeply interested in religious matters, but who is 
now invalided, I fear for life, and who is Uving in 
that anticipation of the other world which is a 
great clearer of thought, and he said to me : " I do 
not trouble myself now about the details of Scripture. 
I am content to rest in God's good Fatherhood, and 
that He will do the best that is possible for me/' 
The nearing of the other world often clears away 
many of the dogmatisms of theology. A well- 
known minister who was in his time of retirement 
a listener to me in my early days, and who, though 
we were the best of friends, used to reproach me 
kindly for the lack of theology in my utterances, 
and when I responded to his wish and gave more 
theology, said he '' didn't like it," yet, as I stood 
by his bedside as the end drew near, said to me 
with deep feeling, and evidently referring to his old 
craving for more theology, ''I see many things in 
a very different light now." And I shall never 
forget how, when the late Pasteur Wagner, of Paris, 
whose books are known all over the world, was 
visiting me, as we talked together of great matters 
in my study late into the night, he exclaimed, 
" ' Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit ' is 
enough forme ! " 



CERTAIN PASSAGES IN SCRIPTURE 79 

To a like confidence a like-minded soul was led, 
and his confidence is expressed in his poem, '* The 
Eternal Goodness/' which has done so much to 
assure and comfort sensitive but perplexed minds : 

" I bow my forehead to the dust, 
I veil mine eyes for shame. 
And urge, in trembling self-distrust, 
A prayer without a claim. 

I see the wrong that round me lies, 

I feel the guilt within ; 
I hear, with groan and travail-cries, 

The world confess its sin : 

Yet, in the maddening maze of things, 

And tossed by storm and flood, 
To one fixed trust my spirit clings : 

I know that God is good. 

Not mine to look where cherubim 

And seraphs may not see. 
But nothing can be good in Him 

Which evil is in me. 

The wrong that pains my soul below 

I dare not throne above : 
I know not of His hate — I know 

His goodness and His love f 

I dimly guess, from blessings known. 

Of greater out of sight. 
And with the chastened psalmist own 

His judgments too are right. 

I know not where His islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air ; 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond His love and care. 

And Thou, O Lord, by whom are seen 

Thy creatures as they be, 
Forgive me if too close I lean 

My human heart on Thee ! '* ^ 

1 John Greenleaf Whittier. 



IV 

CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 

Not only have hindrances been found in certain 
things in Scripture, which needed and often lacked 
right explanation, and, in some cases, were not parts 
of the original Gospel, but the vision of the perfect 
Fatherhood has been sadly hidden by the forms into 
which the original message has been forced b}^ 
the theologians, fushed on by the ecclesiastics, 
so that the Christian Faith reaches great numbers 
not in its pristine simplicity but in metaphysical 
or legal systems, and so denuded of its original 
vitality and variety. To a large extent these 
systems were framed by races very different in 
their methods of thought and expression from the 
Semitic, amid which the Christian Faith arose, 
who were people of simple rather than of abstract 
thought. 

The Hebrews were rather poets than philosophers. 
They used their imagination far more than their 
reason. The Bible would have been a very different 
book had it come to us through the Greek, who was 
given to subtle thinking. It is fortunate for us 
that the Bible came to us through a simple- 

80 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 81 

minded rather than through a subtle-minded race, 
for thus it can, in the main, be understood by the 
simple-minded. As it declares of the way of holi- 
ness, '' the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not 
err therein/' 

How does it come about, then, that the religion 
whose book is, in the sense I have named, so simple, 
has become so difficult? For that it has become 
difficult is seen in the demands made upon those who 
would bear the Christian name — in the creeds of the 
CathoUc and the confessions of faith of the Protestant 
Churches. They are alike in this, that they have 
both changed a simple into a difficult faith — a 
faith of pictures and poetry into one abstract and 
abstruse. Bear in mind the twenty-third psalm 
of the Old Testament, which may well stand 
for Christ's vision of God, or the parable of the 
Prodigal Son, in which He pictures His Father's 
feeling even to the rebelUous and wa5rward ; and 
then read the creeds which the Catholic Church 
holds up before all who would bear the Christian 
name — in which the Christian Faith is declared 
to be defined. The creed which goes by the 
name of The Apostles' is, perhaps, an exception 
as to simplicity, though objection may be and is 
taken by many to certain of its phrases. But of 
the Nicene Creed it may be said that, whether its 
theology be accurate or not, its method is leagues 
away from that adopted by Jesus or the Apostles, 
whilst of the creed which goes under the name of 
St. Athanasius it may be said that it belongs to 
6 



82 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

quite another world and spirit than that of the 
New Testament.^ 

The Apostles probably would not have understood 
what such creeds meant, and, certainly, would not 
have approved of much which they declare. There 
is, as everyone can see, a whole world of difference 
between them. They do not seem to belong to the 
same religion either in spirit or substance. Of these 
creeds the Apostles would have said they contained 
a Gospel which was not the Gospel of their Master 
Jesus — of that Jesus who spoke the Sermon on the 
Mount or the parable of the Prodigal Son. 

With these Gospels in its hands, it may well be 
asked how was the Catholic Church led to frame 
creeds so different both in substance and spirit. 
To answer that question fully would need a 
volume rather than a chapter. All that can be 
attempted is to indicate in outline how all this 
came about. 

The Christian Faith came to the world through 
the Semitic, or, as we usually call it, the Hebrew 
race. From beginning to end the Bible arose among 
a race which had a special fitness for giving the world 
a religion of the highest kind. That race had the 
finest ethical and spiritual capacity for the discern- 
ment of God. In other words, it had a genius for 
religion. And, happily, its mind ran in simple 

1 Of all these creeds it may be said that they are lacking in 
inspirational force, and, whilst they express belief in God and 
His manifestations, they do not hold up, as they might, the 
spirit and way of life which should be men's response to the 
God they declare. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 83 

channels. It could not and did not think in the 
abstract and metaphysical way that the Greeks 
could and did. ^ The Hebrews of the olden time could 
not and did not give the world a Plato or an Aristotle; 
if such as these had been employed the Bible might 
have been inteUigible only to scholars or thinkers. 
But a Bible v/as wanted for the world — the world 
made up chiefly of those who are neither scholars 
nor thinkers. Somebody has said, " God must love 
ordinary people very much, since He has made so 
many of them,'' and, because most of us are ordinary 
folk, the Bible came, not through philosophers like 
Plato and Aristotle, whose writings many of us 
could not understand, but through plain, straight- 
forv/ard men like the prophets of the Old Testament, 
who were not scholars, who came from the farm or 
from common work, and the Apostles of the New 
Testament, who were mostly men who plied the 
fisherman's net, and, above all, by Jesus, all but 
three years of whose life was spent, not in the 
schools of the Rabbis, but in a carpenter's cottage. 
And, since the Bible comes to us, not through the 
schools of philosophy, but through the minds of 
simple men, it is a book which comes home to our 
business and bosoms, and which he who runs may 
read. In its pages simple folk can find all that their 
souls need. The only difficulty of method lies in the 
writings of one writer — Paul — who did have a train- 

1 For a striking description of the contrast between the Sermon 
on the Mount and the Nicene Creed see the Introduction to Dr. 
Hatch's Hibbert Lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas and 
Usages, 



84 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

ing in the colleges of that time, first Greek in Tarsus, 
and then Hebrew in Jerusalem, and in whose epistles 
there are the greatest difficulties, partly, it may be, 
because of his college training. In his little book 
called Polonius, Edward Fitzgerald says : " We can- 
not doubt that Christianity itself made way by means 
of such parables as were never uttered before or 
after. Imagine (be it with reverence) that Jeremy 
Bentham had had the promulgation of it." And the 
Christian Faith, having reached us mainly through 
these simple men, should have been kept in the 
essentially simple form they gave it to us. If we 
had received the Christian Faith direct from them, 
it would almost certainly have remained in those 
simple forms. But we did not get it direct from 
those Hebrew folk. It has reached us through other 
peoples, and to them is due the vast change which 
has passed over it. 

It was not long before the Christian Faith practi- 
cally left the country of its origin — that is, Palestine 
— and the people among whom it was bom — that 
is, the Hebrews — and passed out into the Greek- 
speaking world. 

It is a thousand pities that the Hebrews rejected 
the Gospel and that the Apostles had to turn to the 
Gentiles ; for those Hebrews would have been just 
the right race to preserve the Christian Faith in 
its original and proper form. Christianity was the 
child of Judaism, and the Jews, had they accepted it, 
would have known how to preserve their own child. 
They would have kept it as a religion, and not made a 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 85 

philosophy of it. As I turned over the pages of a 
Jewish Prayer Book, with its intense spirit of wor- 
ship, especially of awe before Jehovah, I could not 
help thinking how wonderful the worship of the Jew 
might have become if into that awe had been infused 
the love element which Jesus infused into religion. 
With this infusion the Jewish Prayer Book would 
have far surpassed the Book of Common Prayer, 
with its too often abject feeling and its introduction 
in many parts of metaphysical and legal elements 
so alien to the original Gospels. The sure instinct 
of the Jew for worship is seen in this fact, that he 
does not introduce into his Prayer Book the whole 
of the book of Psalms, even though it is his peculiar 
possession, but only some forty psalms suited to 
public worship, and in which I do not find any of 
those imprecatory notes which jar upon the feel- 
ings of the right-minded Christian worshipper in 
the whole Psalter as included in the Book of 
Common Prayer. 

But the Jew rejected the Christian Faith, and so 
it passed on to a people who did not know how to 
preserve it in its simplicity. It fell first into the 
hands of the Greeks, and after their manner they 
made it abstract and metaphysical. Whilst it was 
amongst the Hebrews it was like a fair flower, alive, 
growing, full of colour and fragrance in the garden ; 
but the Greeks plucked the flower, dried it, pressed 
it, labelled it, put it into a museum — in other words, 
they made a creed — a theology from which all the 
life had been pressed out ; and so it has come down 



86 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

to us in the Catholic Church. Read the Gospels, 
and then read the Nicene or the Athanasian Creeds, 
and say if it is not so, 

In this connection it may be well to remember 
that the East has been the birthplace of all the 
great religions of the world — Hinduism, Buddhism, 
Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism and its two 
derivative rehgions — Christianity and Islamism — all 
arose under Eastern skies. That surely suggests 
some special fitness in the East for giving birth 
to religion ! Robert Browning probably discerns 
wherein the fitness lay — when he makes Luria 
exclaim : 

" My own East ! 
How nearer God we were ! He glows above 
With scarce an intervention, presses close 
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours : 
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know 
The everlasting minute of creation 
Is felt there ; now it is, as it was then ; 
All changes at His instantaneous will, 
Not b}^ the operation of a law 
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work, 
His hand is still engaged upon His world.'* 

Now, if the East is the great bringer to birth of 
religion, it surely follows that religion thrives best 
when kept to its Eastern type and method, and thus 
it is in danger of losing something when changed 
from the imaginative, pictorial, mystical method of 
the East into the logical, defining, and often legal 
methods of the West. 

Doubtless it was inevitable that when the 
Christian religion — that child of the East — was 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 87 

brought into the different atmosphere of the West, 
through the impact of Western minds upon it, 
it should lose something of its oriental character; 
but surely it might have been kept closer to its 
original idiom and method ; and it probably would 
have been, had not the theologians forced it into 
their moulds. Had it been entrusted to widest 
commonalty, whilst to some extent being Western- 
ised, it would have kept more of its oriental character 
— the picturesque, the imaginative, the emotional 
in which the common people delight, as is clearly 
shown by their following of Jesus, whose speech 
was so pictorial and parabolic. 

Matthew Arnold lamented that we had Hebraised 
our religion too much. If he had seen a Uttle deeper, 
he would have lamented that we had not kept it to 
its Hebrew way. The mischief was done by the 
Greeks, who turned it from a religion into a philo- 
sophy, and so there was lost the simplicity and direct- 
ness which in other parts of his writings Arnold 
pleaded for. Kept in the Hebrew idiom, it would 
have commended itself even to him, if anything 
could ever have commended itself to his somewhat 
superior mind. 

In the Apostles' time, and in the very early Church, 
they did not repeat a creed in their worship. It is 
not a very seemly thing to repeat a creed — when a 
child comes into his father's presence he does not 
say : '' O Father, I really do believe in you ! '' That 
is taken for granted. And, as a matter of fact, the 
creeds were built up, not to express faith in God; but 



88 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

to drive and keep out those regarded as heretics — 
who sometimes were the right beUevers. It is 
not a very Christian proceeding to make an expression 
of faith in order to keep out those from whom we 
differ in mind. There is therefore very good ground 
for not reciting a creed in worship. Speaking of 
the earUest Christians, John Ruskin says : 

** In their pure, early, and practical piety they 
saw there w^as no need for codes of morality or 
systems of metaphysics. Their virtue compre- 
hended everything, entered into everything, it was 
too vast and spiritual to be defined ; but there was 
no need of definitions. For through faith, working 
by love, Ihey knew that all human excellence would 
be developed in due order, for that, without faith, 
neither reason could define nor effort reach the 
lowest phase of Christian virtue.'' ^ 

Up to the time of the Council of Nic^a, '' Each 
local community had its own confession of belief 
to be employed in connection with the baptismal 
rite. Probably, judging by New Testament hints, 
it was of the simplest order : ' Jesus is Lord,' or 
' I believe in Jesus, the Son of God,' or ' I believe 
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.' " ^ 

Even the Free Churches, though not using creeds in 
their worship, have not escaped the tendency of 
which I have spoken — the Gospel has not reached 
them in its original purity, simplicity, and pic- 
turesqueness, since it has not reached them direct 
fiom its Hebrew source. There is a good deal of the 
Greek influence upon it of which I have spoken, but 

^ The Stones of Venice, vol. ii, ch. viii, par. 45. 
2 Early Church History, by R. Martin Pope, p. 72. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 89 

there is still more of the Latin influence. Christi- 
anity has come to them chiefly through the Latins, 
who were not so much given to abstract as to 
legal thought. They were rather law-makers than 
philosophers. Our English laws owe much to their 
jurisprudence. And so the Gospel has come to the 
Free Churches chiefly in legal forms. It has been 
regarded rather in the light of the law court than 
in the light of the home, and God has been looked 
on as a great Judge rather than as a perfect Father. 
Thus there arose what has passed under various 
names as Predestinationism, Augustinianism, and, 
last of all, Calvinism. 

The origin of this must be sought in the Epistles 
of St. Paul, especially that to the Romans. This 
Apostle had been trained in the Rabbinical School 
at Jerusalem and could not quite escape the influence 
of certain of its ideas. Against many of these, it 
is true, he fought with all his might ; but the 
Particularism in relation to the Jewish nation held so 
strongly in that school and against which St. Paul 
fought passed over in his mind, probably quite 
unconsciously to himself, and was applied to indivi- 
duals and found definite expression in the doctrine 
of election in his Epistle to the Romans. When 
quite free from this old Rabbinical Particularism, 
the Apostle moves out into a Universalism of the 
most pronounced kind. 

And then, later, Augustine adopted this parti- 
cularist view of St. Paul, and, as Dr. Pusey, his great 
admiirer and translator, admits, gave birth to the 



90 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Jansenists and Luther and Calvin, who were detested 
by him. 

Centuries later, this doctrine was taken up by 
John Calvin, and less strongly by Martin Luther, 
and through them most of the Churches called 
Protestant have received their Gospel. And so 
from the sixteenth century down to nearly our 
own time Christianity has reached them chiefly 
through the mind of John Calvin, who was far 
more of a lawyer than an apostle.^ And we see 
the result in the Confessions of Faith which until 
recently ruled most of the Protestant Churches. 

One example of this is found in the Westminster 
Confession of Faith, which was accepted by practically 
all the English-speaking Protestant Churches, save 
the Methodist, who arose later, down to the middle 
of the nineteenth century and was the basis of 
all Presbyterian Churches till about the year 1890, 
when it was relieved of some of its awful features, 
especially that on the Decrees of God — the most 
awful declaration concerning God ever made, which 
attributes to Him injustice of the most terrible kind. 

The legal rendering of the Christian Faith which 
came first from Augustine, and then through 

1 " If the Christian Apostles, St. Peter or St. Paul, could return 
to the Vatican, they might possibly inquire the name of the 
Deity who is worshipped with such mysterious rites in that 
magnificent temple ; at Oxford or Geneva they would experience 
less surprise ; but it might still be incumbent on them to peruse 
the Catechism of the Church, and to study the orthodox com- 
mentators on their own writings and the words of the Master.*' — 
Gibbon, Decline <^W(^ Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. vi, p. 282. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 91 

Calvin, reached down to quite modem times, if not 
dead is fast dying, save in a few obscure comers, 
and therefore does not need consideration here ; 
but the metaphysical rendering of the Faith, which 
came through the Greeks, still more or less holds 
possession, especially in Churches whose religion, to 
use Sabatier's phrase, is a '" Religion of Authority,'' 
and, therefore, the question whether it is true to 
the Christian t5^e as revealed in the Gospel^ which 
is the ultimate test, does need consideration. 

Doubtless it was inevitable that when the Christian 
Gospel passed out into the Greek-speaking world, 
its thinkers should apply their minds to, and, after 
their manner, philosophise about it. It is well that 
mind should be brought into the service of religion. 
It cannot be fully served without. But the Christian 
religion was not well served by the reduction of its 
Gospel to the fixed articles of a creed, and its imposi- 
tion as a form and limit to the thought of all who 
beUeved. This was to present a naked skeleton 
instead of one clothed with flesh for men to behold 
and admire ! Was not this creed-making a de- 
parture from the way of the earlier Greek both in 
his religion and his philosophy, both in temple and 
grove ? Was the Greek ever before given to 
concise credal formularies? Can a creed be dis- 
covered in the religion of the Greeks? Was not 
their religion singularly free from any rigid 
definitions ? Was not the very idea of orthodoxy, 
correctness of belief, conspicuous by its absence? 

Surely this creed-making was quite alien both 



92 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

to the example and spirit of those earlier times. 
Had the Christian Gospel arisen centuries earlier 
and fallen into the hands of the Greeks, say, in the 
time of Plato or Aristotle, or, if we can imagine it, 
into the hands of those great thinkers, it may be 
gravely questioned whether they would have even 
attempted to give it concise credal form ; indeed, 
judging from their own writings, this would have 
been to them a quite alien proceeding.^ 

This creed-making of the Christian Gospel is 
the unhappy result of people who spoke the Greek 
language, but were leagues away both in their 
speech and spirit from that great people to whom we 
owe not only a wonderful language but a wonderful 
literature. 

Orthodoxy has become the boast of the Church 
which, in later and present days, goes by the name 
of Greek, but the real Greeks would have rejected 
both the name and the idea, for they were too 
thoughtful to imagine that absolute accuracy could 
be reached or expressed in words on so tremendous 
a theme as the object of religion. And, even if 
they had philosophised about it, they would have 
left some range or margin in which the human mind 
could work, and not fenced all in by high credal 

1 " The cold reception given by the early Greeks to the art of 
writing and traces of the way in which they disparaged treatises 
and literature appear even in Plato (Phcsdrus, 275, 276). This shy 
suspicion was due to the Hellenic instinct for flexibility through 
politics, morality, religion, they felt a certain horror for whatever 
tended to fix and petrify ideas/' — The Historical New Testament, 
Moffatt, p. 259. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 93 

barriers. Such range or margin is an essential 
condition of thinking to any purpose. Creeds check 
rather than encourage thought. And often the 
great effort of thinkers is how to evade or explain 
them away. But if in a degenerate age like the 
fourth century the leaders of the Church, to pre- 
serve what they regarded as orthodoxy by driv- 
ing out those looked on as heretics, felt that 
they must frame their creeds, it surely would have 
been wiser to keep them within the schools of 
theology and not to impose them on the people at 
large, leading them, as they were sure to do, and 
actually did, to think that the chief thing in 
rehgion was right opinion and not, as it is, a right 
spirit and a right life. And if the harm was great 
in those early times to people who spoke the Greek 
language, how much greater the harm when those 
creeds came to be translated into other languages 
which often imperfectly represented, and sometimes 
even misrepresented, the originals ! All these efforts 
to reduce a Gospel which came to the woild in 
suggestive, pictorial, and, therefore, unsystematic 
forms, to the supposed precision of creeds has les- 
sened the force of its appeal and so proved rather 
a hindrance than a help to its progress in the 
world. 

Dr. Briggs, who is rather disposed to defend 
definite expressions of the Faith, is obUged to say : 

*' The Nicene Creed did not promote the peace 
and unity of the Church. As Duchesne says : 
'* * It only resulted in a short suspension of hostili- 



94 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

ties, followed by a war abominable and fratricidal, 
which divided the whole of Christendom from Arabia 
as far as Spain, and was only quieted after sixty 
years of scandal that bequeathed to succeeding gene- 
rations the germs of schisms from which the Church 
still suffers/ ^ 

*' Sjmods and provincial coimcils were summoned 
by the different parties, in which these condemned 
and excommunicated each other. Political and 
national questions became involved with those 
that were rehgious and doctrinal ; and Christianity 
became so distracted that it could not have survived 
if it had not been for the Divine energy of the Holy 
Spirit, which guided it safely through a multitude 
of disasters/' ^ 

It is, indeed, difficult to follow those who assert 
that Athanasius saved the Christian Faith at Nicaea 
by securing the insertion in the creed of the word 
" Homoousion '' instead of the word '' Homoiousion " 
— ^that Christ was of the same instead of being of 
like substance with the Father ! And it is still more 
difficult to follow the English Church Union when, 
through its President, Lord Halifax, it declared 
that the far later creed wrongly attributed to St. 
Athanasius is the anchor of that Faith. Especially 
when it is so evident that both the Nicene and the 
so-called Athanasian Creed were set in an idiom so 
different from that of the Gospels. 

I have tried to see what the actual effects of this 
metaphysical rendering of the Christian Faith were, 
especially in the early days of the Church. It at 

i Histoire Ancienne de I'Eglise, vol. ii, p. 157. 
2 Christian Symbolics, by C. A. Briggs, p. 85. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 95 

once occurred to me to ask what were its results in 
the very regions where the Nicene Creed was framed 
and enforced. If that Creed was so vital and 
essential, then its effects on the Churches which 
first accepted it should have been to the last degree 
beneficent, and should have rendered them so 
lightly established in the Faith that they would have 
been able to resist all attacks and stand strong and 
permanent for all after-ages. Was this the case ? 
Were those Churches rendered so strong by this vital 
definition as to be standing and flourishing to-day ? 
Is not the very opposite the case ? Have not prac- 
tically all the Churches which first accepted these 
metaphysical renderings of the Faith perished from 
the earth ? What Christianity is there left to-day in 
Nicsea, where in a.d. 325 the creed which took its 
name was first accepted ; or in Constantinople, 
where in a.d. 381 it was approved ; or in Chalcedon, 
where in a.d. 451 it was finally adopted ? What 
report would a traveller through Asia Minor and 
Northern Africa, where the Christian Church was 
once apparently firmly established on the basis of 
the Nicene Creed, bring to us of their condition 
to-day? Would he not have to report that they 
have all practically passed out of existence ? That 
they were rendered so weak by dependence on minute 
metaphysical distinctions that when Mohamme- 
danism came along, with its simple doctrine of God, 
in spite of its coldness and hardness, they were power- 
less to resist and were swept out of existence, so that 
the places that knew them once know them no 



96 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

more, and the Christian Faith has to be newly 
propagated where once it seemed firmly established.^ 

Thomas Carlyle discerns the real cause of this 
when he says : '' Mahomet's creed we called a kind 
of Christianity ; and, really, if we look at the wild, 
rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid 
to heart, I should say a better kind than of those 
miserable Syrian sects, with their vain j anglings 
about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full 
of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead/' ^ 

If the pnnciple of Jesus, that by their fruits ye 
shall know them, be applied to this metaphysical 
rendering of the Christian Faith, is it not altogether 
discredited ? 

This is the more remaikable when it is remembered 
that the Church of those early days possessed men 
of exceptional ability, now known as the Fathers of 
the Church, who could and did defend her teaching. 
It was from no lack of ability in her preachers 
and commentators and apologists that the regions 
where most of them lived and laboured have 
practically lost their Christianity. If it had been 
sufficiently vital to be preserved the ability was 
there in these Fathers to preserve it. But it was 
not preserved, because along this metaphysical 

1 ' ' The metaphysical questions on the attributes of God and the 
liberty of man have been agitated in the schools of Mahometans 
as well as in those of the Christians ; but among the former they 
have never engaged the passions of the people, or disturbed 
the tranquillity of the State." — Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. vi, 
p. 283. 

2 Lectures on Heroes, p. 58. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 97 

line the essential vitality of the Gospel message was 
lost. Christianity came to be regarded as an 
orthodoxy — a right opinion, instead of an ortho- 
praxy — a right practice ; and the saying " Lord, 
Lord,'' did not lead on to doing of the will ; the house 
was built upon the sand, and when the storm came 
it fell, and great was the fall thereof. 

This metaphysical rendering of the Christian 
Faith passed over to the Latin Church, by which, 
in the ninth century, the Nicene Creed in its official 
Western form was finally adopted at Rome ; but 
the Latins did not lay so much stress on it as the 
Greeks, whose successors in lands where the Chris- 
tian Church survives still call theirs the Orthodox 
Church. The less subtle and practical mind of 
the Latins laid more stress on organisation and 
obedience, and so, perhaps, it comes to pass that 
whilst in its original homes the Greek Church has 
practically perished, the Latin Church still flourishes, 
not only in new regions, but in its first home at 
Rome. 

But it may, perhaps, be said : If the first results 
of a metaphysical Christianity were in those early 
times so disastrous, have not some of its later ones 
been more encouraging ? It may be said that the 
Oxford Movement, which arose about eighty years 
ago, was a return to the faith and methods of the 
third or fourth century, as is seen in the fact that 
one of its early efforts was the production of the 
Library of the Fathers in an English dress ; indeed, 
that movement was a return to the Fathers and 
7 



98 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

their doctrine and methods. Certainly it was that, 
rather than a return to the methods and teaching 
of the New Testament, which is evident in the 
fact that, though the Oxford leaders were deeply 
versed in the Fathers, none of them took rank as 
New Testament scholars. New Testament scholar- 
ship must be sought in a very different section of the 
English Church : in Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, 
who had no part in nor sympathy with the Oxford 
Movement, but were rather its opponents. Still, 
it may be asked. Did not the Oxford Movement 
give a new impulse to the EngUsh Church ? Certainly 
it did. This, it may be, was due partly to the 
low state of that Church, which rendered it disposed 
to welcome any offered uplift, and partly to the 
personal charm of Keble, Newman, Pusey, Hurrell, 
Froude, and other less known leaders of the Oxford 
Movement.^ 

That Movement arose at a time in which the 
Church of England was practically in the hands 
of two parties. The first of these — the High and 
Dry, as it has been called — regarded their Church as 
one great means of keeping things as they were. 

1 I have used the word ' charm ' concerning the leaders of 
the Oxford Movement, and the word certainly applies to John 
Henry Newman, its genius. I used to wonder, as I read his 
sermons, at the great influence they exerted at Oxford ; but in 
an interview with him, when a smile flitted over his somewhat 
plain features, my wonder ceased. John Keble 's influence 
was largely due to his great success at a very early age in 
the schools, which wakened an attitude of almost reverence 
for him at Oxford. As I heard him at Hursley — and I often did 
so — I could not help wondering at the part he had played in so 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 99 

Though it repudiated pohtics in religion, it was in 
reaHty a great conservative force in England. For 
the -most part religious fervour was lacking, and in 
some cases even decried, in this party. All that was 
insisted upon was a close adherence to the rubrics 
of the Prayer Book. 

The second was the Evangelical party, in which 
the fervour lacking in the High Church section was 
the prominent feature, personal conversion the great 
desideratum, and full reliance on the letter of Scrip- 
ture, construed in a mildly Calvinistic direction, the 
guiding light. Speaking broadly, by both these 
sections church buildings and their surroundings 
were sadly neglected, services slovenly conducted, 
music in worship and art in the embellishment of 
church buildings considered rather as a hindrance 
than a help to devotion. This was specially the 
case in the Evangelical section. 

To such a condition of things the Oxford Movement 
came and worked many beneficent changes. Its 
advent practically put an end to the High and Dry 
Party, which soon ceased to be a factor of any 
weight in the Church of England. It aroused a 
greater interest in church buildings and their 

great a movement, as neither matter nor utterance nor expres- 
sion of face was arresting. Richmond's portrait glorifies his face ; 
indeed, he confessed that he had told the truth in love. I never 
had the good fortune to see or hear Dr. Pusey, but my conception 
of him is of an aristocratic ascetic, for ascetic he certainly was, 
as is shown in the fact that he obtained from Mr. Keble, his 
confessor, permission to wear a hair-shirt. There was about 
the leaders a certain aloofness and mystery which gave distinction 
to and greatly helped that Movement. 



100 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

surroundings, and made them seem objects worthy 
of religious care. Restoration of neglected, and in 
some cases of dilapidated buildings, went on all over 
the land. Window-painters and ecclesiastical art 
workers grew busy. Music was enlisted and musi- 
cians were given a higher place in the services of the 
Church. For the most part all this moved along 
worthy lines; but, of course, in so widespread 
a movement it sometimes fell below. But, speaking 
broadly, the results were worthy. For many a 
long day the Evangelicals stood out against, resisted, 
and even denounced the Movement and all its works, 
but gradually the spell worked, and they began to 
care more for their buildings, to allow the ecclesias- 
tical art worker and window-painter and the sacred 
musician to find their way into their midst. Few 
are the churches which at some point or other have 
wholly escaped the influence of the Oxford Move- 
ment, and in some ways the influence has been for 
good. 

It may be urged — indeed, it has been urged— that 
" the Oxford Movement was an advance upon the 
narrower and still more obscurantist Evangelicalism 
which preceded it, and that to substitute the Church 
for the Bible as the seat of ultimate authority was a 
step in advance, though not intended as such ; and, 
in point of fact, Liberalism within the Church has 
found much more favour than amongst the Evan- 
gelicals, who now at last are only awakening to the 
impossibility of the Biblical infallibility theory.'' * 

^ Dr. Hastings Rashdall in a letter to the author. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 101 

It is undoubtedly true that the Oxford Movement 
rendered a valuable service in that it carried its 
followers over from the authority of a Book, which, 
by its very nature, is fixed, to the authority of a 
Church, which, since it consists of living persons, is 
able to move. And if the choice has to be made 
between the authority of a Book and of a Church, 
the truer decision would be for the Church ; and if 
the Church were, as it ought to be, the expression of 
the ever-living and active Spirit of God, the results 
would be in a high degree salutary. But the claim 
of the Oxford Movement is not for the Church of the 
present but of the past, and the latest period to which 
it will defer is that of the undivided Church of long 
centuries ago, so that to all intents and purposes the 
Church to which it defers is as fixed and unalterable 
as the Book. In its view there was a period in which 
the fullest expression of the Divine mind was 
reached by the Church. In this respect the Church 
of Rome is in a stronger position than the Anglican, 
since it possesses in the Pope, who claims with 
the aid of the College of Cardinals in Cormcil 
assembled to speak as the Vicar of Christ, and so 
has a living voice. If that claim could be made 
good — if the reality corresponded with the claim — 
then if there must he an outward authority, here it 
would be found, rather than in a Book whose last 
word is nearly two thousand years old. But the 
AngUcan Church does not possess, and does not even 
claim to possess, any such living voice of authority 
over faith and morals, and so it is tied to the de- 



102 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

cisions and doctrine of the undivided Church on 
which it lays so much stress and by which its course 
is directed. It may have in some degree delivered 
the more thoughtful of its followers from the bondage 
of an infallible Book, but in doing so it has placed 
them under the bondage of a Church many centuries 
old, and so it cannot respond as it should do to the 
needs and thoughts of the new world in which it 
now stands. If it would only move forward and 
recognise the action of the living Spirit of God on 
individual minds and so in the Church of which they 
are members, if it would rely on the inward voice 
of the Spirit rather than on the ancient dicta of the 
Church, it would pass from among the religions of 
Authority to the company of the religions of the 
Spirit, and would be able to bear a living witness to 
this distracted world. 

Churches of the Oxford Movement type, and, 
indeed, all Churches, need to rem.ember that the 
great end is not to keep under authority, but the 
uplift, ethically and spiritually, of those who gather 
for worship, or, to put it more definitely and precisely, 
their likening to Christ and their being made to 
realise their sonship to the Father on which He 
laid such tremendous stress. This is the final 
test of every Church — does it draw its adherents to 
a sense of relationship of children to the Father, on 
which Christ ever insisted, out of which spring the 
response and repose of the heart and the obedience 
of the life ? 

Auguste Sabatier, the great French theologian, 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 103 

in his principal book, divides religions into those 
of Authority and those of the Spirit. It is a vital 
distinction, and the results are widely different. Re- 
ligions of authority naturally keep their adherents on 
the plane of servitude. They are ruled from without 
by commands, not moved from within by inspirations 
and convictions. They are not encouraged to rise 
to the position designed by Christ for His followers : 
*' I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth 
not v/hat his Lord doeth ; but I have called you 
friends, for whatsoever I have heard of My Father, 
I have made known unto you/' And it is because 
the Oxford Movement led its adherents back to the 
ideas of earlier ages, when Christianity was regarded 
as a religion of authority, that its results are not of 
the highest kind, for authority working from without 
does not, and in the very nature of things cannot, 
produce results as vital and spiritual as love working 
from within. Authority awakens the sense of ser- 
vitude, the Spirit wakens the sense of sonship. 
Sabatier says : 

" As the ultimate power of moral development in 
the human being, the Spirit of God brings to it no 
constraint from without ; it determines and ani- 
mates us from within, and thus maintains its Ufe. 
When the Christian religion becomes an inward 
reality, a fact of consciousness, it is nothing more 
than consciousness raised to its highest power." 

And he quotes Alexander Vinet, the great Swiss 
theologian : *' That which I ahsoluttly repudiate is 
authority,'' And it is because the Oxford leaders 



104 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

and their successors relied on outward authority 
in reUgion, which Christ never did, that the results, 
in the very nature of things, are, and must be, 
lacking in spontaneity and breadth. Along such 
lines the liberty wherewith Christ makes His people 
free cannot be known. 

Even though it should spread itself over the 
world, and draw men into its enclosures, would it 
not, must it not, fail to do what Christ meant 
His Gospel to do — to awaken that vital sense of 
sonship, which kindles love in the heart and glad 
obedience in the life ? ^ 

It is thankfully and gladly acknowledged here 
that many living imder a religion of authority have 
risen to the sense of sonship, and have been full 
of the fiUal feeling, just as many who accepted 
Calvin's despotic idea of God reached a like 
position, though often their lives were clouded by 
the creed they had accepted. Of many men and 
women it has been remarked that '' they were better 
than their creed.'' This is commendatory of the 
believers, but condemnatory of their creed : a creed, 
however, should be high above, not beneath. And, 

1 Since this chapter was written I notice that the Rev. R. 
Miklejohn, writing in The Challenge of April 29, 192 1, says: 
*' Tractarianism once more galvanised the corpse into the sem- 
blance of life and activity. There was about Tractarianism a 
glamour which attracted certain types of mind ; particularly it 
attracted that type of clerical mind which finds, and rejoices 
to find, in the magnification of the ecclesiastical idea a corre- 
sponding exaltation of the priestly office. V^ith the Tractarian 
movement the sacerdotal idea entered upon the latest, and, we 
may hope, the last of its spasmodic semblances of vitality." 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 105 

though under a religion of authority many have 
risen above it, yet it must be evident to all that in 
the very nature of things the normal effect of such a 
religion is to keep in servitude, not to lift to the 
filial position. 

The mission of the Church, when it understands 
its mission aright, is not to keep men and women in 
bondage to itself, but to render them independent, 
through their close fellowship with the Father, so that 
even if away from all Churches, they would feel that 
they were not away from God. 

Coventry Patmore expresses this when he says : 

" The work of the Church in the world is not to 
teach the mysteries of hfe so much as to persuade 
the soul to that arduous degree of purity at which 
God Himself becomes her teacher. The work of the 
Church ends where the knowledge of God begins.'' ^ 

If the Roman Catholic Church, to which Mr. 
Patmore belonged, and the Churches that rely on 
authority, would only follow his lead, they would 
rise to the higher position of what Sabatier calls 
religions of the Spirit. When such knowledge of 
God is reached that real fellowship with Him is 
set up, the soul will naturally seek worship with 
those like-minded, if not so much for its own sake, 
for the encouragement and help of those carrying 
on the work of the Church ; but the Christian name 
may not and should not be denied, as is so often the 
case, to those who do not feel drawn to public 
worship. In our day some of those who never cross 

1 Rod, Root, and Flower, by Coventry Patmore. 



106 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

the threshold of any church excel in spirituaUty, and 
certainly in service to their fellows, those who spend 
much time in what is wrongly called Divine service. 
In some cases such persons have been repelled by the 
routine way in which worship has been conducted 
or by the incompetence of the pulpit. For the non- 
attendance at public worship it is constantly de- 
ploring, the Church is largely responsible, since its 
services have often been so perfunctory and unin- 
teresting. Attendance at services is not the test 
which Christ Himself would have appUed, but the 
doing of the will of the Father. The Christianity of 
Christ is not nearly so ecclesiastical as it has been made 
to appear hy priests and parsons. Many of those who 
won the highest commendation from Christ were 
not only outside the company of His followers, but 
outside even the pale of Judaism, and, indeed, out- 
side all ecclesiastical enclosures ! 

The Christian Faith, as it arose, was like a stream 
high up in the mountains, clear and pure and spark- 
ling, but on its way to the sea it drew into itself the 
outflow of the cities on its banks, imtil its clearness 
and purity and beauty were well-nigh lost. In 
other words, the Gospel as it fell from the lips and 
was reflected from the life of its Founder — simple, 
picturesque, heart-moving — became under Greek 
influences abstract and difficult, and under Latin 
influences it became hard, legal, often unjust. 

Dr. Horace Bushnell says : 

" Nothing makes infidels more surely than the 
spinning, splitting, nerveless refinements of theology. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 107 

This endeavour to get the truths of reHgion away 
from the imagination into propositions of the 
speculative understanding makes a most dreary 
and sad history. They were plants alive and in 
flower, but now the flavours are gone, the juices are 
dried, and the skeleton parts packed away and classi- 
fied in a dry herbarium called theology. Scientific 
theology will be completely thought out about the 
same time that words are substituted for algebraic 
notions and poetry reduced to the methods of the 
calculus or the logarithmic tables.'' 

And then he makes a comparison between Turretin 
the theologian and Bunyan the dreamer : 

" The venerable dogmatiser is already far gone 
by, but the glorious Bunyan fire still bums, because 
it is fire, kindles the world's imagination more and 
more, and claims a right to live till the sun dies out 
in the sky. His Pilgrim holds on its way still fresh 
and strong as ever — ^nay, fresher and stronger 
than ever, never to be put off the road till the 
last traveller heavenward is conducted in." 

At last, after all these long centuries, in many 
quarters men are waking up to the fact that, if they 
are to know what the Christian Faith really is, 
they must go, not to Greek thinkers or to Latin law- 
makers, but to Him v/ho preached and in His Ufe 
illustrated the Gospel, and that they must learn of 
Him if they are to find rest unto their souls. 

Professor Troeltsch seems to see signs of the 
coming of this better f eeUng, for, speaking of modem 
reUgion, he says : 

'* Religion is completely transferred from the 



108 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

sphere of the substantial sacramental communica- 
tion of grace and of ecclesiastical authority to the 
psychologically intelligible sphere of the affirmation 
of a thought of God and of God's grace, and all the 
ethico-religious effects arise with psychological clear- 
ness and obviousness from this central thought. The 
sensuous sacramental miracle is done away with, 
and in its stead appears the miracle of thought — 
that man, in his sin and weakness, can grasp and 
confidently assent to such a thought. That is the 
end of priesthood and hierarchy, the sacramental 
communication of ethico-religious powers after the 
manner of a sensible substance, and the ascetic 
withdrawal from the world, with its special merits.''^ 

Surely it must be evident to all that what our 
hearts crave is that which awakens confidence in 
God, in His perfect Fatherhood ; and that can be 
brought about only in simple ways. Confidence is 
rarely, if ever, awakened by subtle argument which 
taxes the intellect to understand, but only by that 
which makes its appeal to our hearts, and such 
appeal must always be of a simple nature. The 
lovable is always essentially simple, so that when we 
see it we cannot help loving it, and this is the method 
in our Christian Faith as it reaches its culmination 
in Jesus Christ, whom really to see is to love. " We 
love Him because He first loved us." 

Dr. H. Symonds, of Christ Church Cathedral, 
Montreal, whose recent death was so great a loss to 
the Canadian Church, says : 

" To-day authority of the external kind has 

^ Protestantism and Progress, p. 193. 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 109 

broken down, and, to adopt the words of the dis- 
tinguished South African, Smuts : ' Theology has 
once more struck its tents and is again on the march/ 
And to-day the quest is for ' The ReUgion of the 
Spirit ' ! And because the rehgion of Jesus was not 
credal or dogmatic in form, but spiritual, it is capable 
of, and, indeed, demands purer and more spiritual 
expression to-day. Men are still asking for founda- 
tions infallible, unchangeable, immovable founda- 
tions on which to build up the fabric of reUgion. 
They suppose that religion cannot continue without 
infallible books, churches, parsons. But what is 
rehgion ? Is it not the attraction of the soul to the 
Infinite Source from which it comes ? And if Jesus, 
being the effulgence of the glory of our Spiritual 
Sun, loses His attractive power no systems of doctrine 
will avail us anything. Are we not discovering 
that we do not need a dogmatic basis for Christianity 
any more than the captain of the ship needs his 
chart when the pilot is on board ? It is by the Spirit 
that we live, and the Spirit is the attractive power of 
the spiritual order. The attempt to hold men to 
truth by dogma is largely inspired by fear and doubt 
of the Holy Spirit. Theology, indeed, we may and 
must have ; a theology, on the one hand, not dis- 
associated from the past, nor, on the other hand, 
a mere rearrangement of specimens preserved from 
the past — a hortus siccus, but a theology which we 
may caU our own. We shall express the old faith in a 
new way, our own way, but we shall not erect our 
new way into an absolute test of Christianity. 
No one of the myriad forms of the activity of the one 
Spirit upon many minds will be imposed as a test 
of membership within the family of God, stiU less of 
salvation ; but rather they will be guides and helps, 
a means to bring men to the full consciousness 



110 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

of the atti active power of the ' Christ after the 
Spirit/ '' 1 

Since the war, signs are multiplying of a yearn- 
ing, not for metaphysical definitions nor for rigid 
ecclesiastical embodiments of the Faith, but for the 
Faith itsell as expressed in the words and illustrated 
in the Ufe of Him of whom we are told '' In Him was 
life, and the life was the Ught of men." If all down 
the ages that Faith had been allowed to reach men 
in its original and vital forms surely it would have 
been much further on toward the conversion of 
the world.* 



Creedless Saints 

Men who would limit the way of holiness to those 
whose thoughts are confined within the bounds of 
creeds or theological systems, or even to those who 
look on the letter of Scripture as the one food for 
their souls — who thus limit the Holy One of Israel- 
would have cause to pause if they faced the fact, for 
fact it is, that some of the loftiest saints the world 
has ever known pursued the upward way with 
little or no dependence on these outward aids, who 

^ The Modern Churchman for November 1920. 

2 Since this chapter was written I notice that Canon Alexander, 
preaching in St. Paul's Cathedral, declared that " the task of the 
Church was to clear away from religion the accretions and accu- 
mulations, the things that were accidental or of secondary value, 
so that men might get as close as they could to the real meaning 
of Christ for humanity. The question was : How could we 
recover that ancient splendour ? " 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 111 

indeed answered to the description of Robert Brown- 
ing in " Christmas Eve '' : 

" I, then, in ignorance and weakness, 
Taking God's help, have attained to think 
My heart does best to receive in meekness 
That mode of worship, as most to his mind 
Where earthly aids being cast behind, 
His All in All appears serene 
With the thinnest human veil between, 
Leaving the mystic lamps, the seven. 
The many motions of his spirit. 
Pass, as they list, to earth from heaven." 

This seems to have been the way which some of 
the finest of the saints pursued. As examples take 
only two — and those in widely severed communions 
—St. Francis of Assisi in the Roman Church, and 
John Woolman in the Society of Friends. No 
one acquainted with the lives of these men will 
doubt that they travelled far up in the holy way. 

Ernest Renan declares St. Francis to be *' the 
only perfect Christian since Jesus. He stands 
alone, as having with boundless faith and love 
endeavoured to fulfil the law laid dov/n in Galilee. 
Of all men, after Jesus, he possessed the clearest 
conscience, the most perfect simphcity, the strongest 
sense of his filial relation to the Heavenly Father. 
God was truly his beginning and his end. In him, 
Adam never seemed to have sinned." ^ Renan did 
not know of John Woolman, nor was he acquainted 
with his Journal, or surely he would have bracketed 
him as the equal of St. Francis. Of John Wool- 

1 Studies in Religious History, p. 315. 



112 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

man, Henry Crabbe Robinson, the friend of Goethe, 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, says : 

'' He is a schone Seek, a beautiful soul. His religion 
was love. His whole existence and all his passions 
were love. His Christianity is most inviting. It 
is fascinating." 

William EUery Channing, Dora Greenwell, Charles 
Lamb, and a host of other keen-eyed observers 
have regarded him in like manner, whilst John 
Greenleaf Whittier says : 

" Guided thus, how passing lovely 
Is the track of Woolman's feet ! 
And his brief and simple record — 
How serenely sweet ! 

O'er life's humblest duties throwing 
Light the earthling never knew, 

Freshening all its dark waste places 
As with Hermon's dew. 

All which glows in Pascal's pages. 
All which sainted Guyon sought, 

Or the blue-eyed German Rahel 
Half unconscious taught : 

Beauty such as Goethe pictured. 

Such as Shelley dreamed of, shed 

Living warmth and starry brightness 

Round that poor man's head." ^ 

And yet neither of these men had any formal 
theology, and depended very little, if at all, on the 
letter of Scripture. 

1 Xo with a copy of Woolman's Journal, with the 

advice, " Get the writings of John Woolman by heart and love 
the early Quakers." — Essays of Elia, 



Creeds and confessions 113 

Ernest Renan says of St. Francis : 

" It is probable that in France, or, indeed, any- 
where but in that sweet and shady Umbrian 
valley, he would have been accused of heresy. 
He drew little from the Bible, which he seldom 
read. He was no scholastic ; he was neither priest 
nor theologian.'' ^ 

It was once made a complaint against John 
Woolman " that his Journal had so little to say 
of doctrines, and so much of duties''; and the 
readers of that Journal will search in vain for any 
sign of reliance on the letter of Scripture. 

St. Francis seems to have been moved only by the 
vision of Jesus which shone upon his eyes, and John 
Woolman chiefly by the gracious influence of the 
Spirit within his soul. Such Hves should convince 
us that '' the chief desideratum in a Church is that 
it should allow no shibboleth, no creed, no ritual 
to take the primary place which belongs to goodness 
of character," and should warn us against demanding 
as necessary qualifications for the Christian calling 
any doctrinal forms in which men have cast their 
thoughts of the Christian Faith, or insistence or 
assent to or dependence on the letter of the Scrip- 
tures. The lives of these men should prevent us 
limiting the leading of God to any man-made 
channels — and help us to realise that " the wind 
bloweth where it listeth," and to regard all those who 
respond to such gales of the Spirit as members 
of the Household of Faith. Profoundly true but 

^ Studies in Religious History, p. 310, 

8 



114 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

often forgotten is the declaration of Renan : 
*' Moreover, when a certain degree of hoUness has 
been attained, heresy is impossible, for at a certain 
height dogma no longer exists, and there is no 
ground for controversy." ^ 

Minds which believe that the grace of God must 
of necessity run only in ecclesiastical or sacramental 
channels have of late been startled by the sight of, 
and still more by contact with and in some cases 
by joining in silent worship with, members of the 
Society of Friends ; and when, beyond this, it has 
come to their knowledge that the Friends have 
probably excelled all other Christian communities 
in relieving the famine and hunger which have 
followed the war. The fruits, so rich and plentiful, 
surely point to the goodness of the tree — and yet 
that tree has never been tended by men claiming 
Apostolical Succession, nor nourished by sacra- 
ments deemed and declared by many to be 
vital. 

Such sights, if allowed their proper weight, must 
do much to break down the fences regarded as neces- 
sary to the Christian Faith, and to get rid of that 
monopoly of the grace of God so often and so long 
claimed by the ecclesiastical and theological and 
priestly mind. Let those who find help in ecclesias- 
tical forms and sacraments, and those whose faith 
runs in doctrinal channels or depends greatly on the 
Scripture, use and profit by these ; but let them 
not insist that what seems needful to them should be 

1 studies in Religious History, p. 3264 



CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS 115 

demanded of others whose minds need and profit 
by a larger, freer, more spiritual atmosphere, and 
who find aid to their soul's life in realms beyond the 
Church's pale. 

It is high time that all monopolies in God, whether 
of the priest or the doctrinaire or the Bibliolater, 
should cease, and they will cease when Christ's vision 
of Him as Spirit prevails, for out of that sprang 
Christ's declaration that the time would come when 
neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem should 
He be worshipped — which meant that the limitations 
of sacred places and all connected with them 
should cease to be regarded as vital necessities, 
and that God, being Spirit, and therefore everywhere 
diffused, should be felt as everywhere and directly 
accessible to the devout soul. 

Those who fear any shock to long-held convic- 
tions, which in many cases should be called pre- 
judices, who are always fearful for the soul of the 
weak brother — too long the bugbear and hindrance 
of the Church — such as these will call this dangerous 
teaching, but truth is never reaUy dangerous, and 
even if it were it is well to remember Stevenson's 
word : '' 'Tis man's perdition to be safe " ; and they 
would do well to take to heart Dr. Fairbairn's word, 
" Churches are here not to conserve the actual but 
to create the ideal." 

Many years ago there appeared in the magazine 
of the college to which I then belonged a piece called 
'* A Sacred Drama," printed there anonymously, 
but now known to have been from the pen of the 



116 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

late Charles Callaway, D.Sc., where one of the 
characters, expressing the writer's mind, says : 

" I never will believe 
That God's great love flows in the narrow gutters 
Of human doctrines and of man-made creeds. 
'Tis like the sea, whose paths are free to all ; 
'Tis like the air, whose breath gives life to all ; 
'Tis like the blessed sun, that shines on all. 
Oh, 'tis a strange, a wondrous thing ; I know 
Not yet, how high, how deep, how vast it be ; 
One thing I know — the love of God is free.** 

and if that Love be free — the channels through 
which it finds expression must also be free. 



PART III 

I 

JESUS CALLING MEN TO THIS PERFECTION 

** Be ye therefore Perfect '' 

To the mind of Jesus, the perfection which is in His 
Father is the goal for humanity — men are not only to 
rest in and enjoy this perfect Fatherhood, but they 
are to strive after a like perfection. This is the ideal 
He holds up before all who accept His leadership. 

" Christ never claimed for Himself what He did 
not claim as within the aspiration of all men. He 
w^as Son of God, but there were other sons of God. 
He was the Son at one with the Father, but He 
taught that this was a communion in which He would 
have all men share/' ^ 

It is, perhaps, futile to discuss the question whether 
such perfection has ever been or can be reached by 
mortal men. There have been those who claimed 
that they had reached it, and that no consciousness 
of failure or sin existed in their minds. On the other 
hand, there have been those who strenuously resisted 

1 The Diary of a Church-goer, by Lord Courtney of Penwith, 
p. 87. 

117 



118 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

the idea that such perfection had been or could be 
reached here on earth. 

The experience of St. Paul, as recorded in his 
Epistle to the Philippians, probably presents what 
may be regarded as something like the possible. 
There we see him responding to the call of His 
Master to the pursuit of this perfection — ^but all 
the time he " counts not himself to have appre- 
hended/' but he is pressing "toward the mark of 
the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus/' 
and he calls as many as are perfect — which clearly 
means all who are seeking to be perfect — ^to be like- 
minded — that is, to be pressing toward the mark 
which should be the aim of all who bear the name of 
Christ. 

St. Paul's may be regarded as a kind of classic 
in the realm of Christian experience. And it is 
interesting to observe how closely it has been fol- 
lowed by those who, like him, had reached to great 
heights of holiness, in whom we see at once the 
pressing toward the mark, and, even when that mark 
was most nearly reached, the feeling that they had 
not attained nor had yet been made perfect. Such 
as these, to use Emerson's well-known phrase, had 
hitched their waggon to a star which had lifted them 
above the miry or dusty roads of earth, but had not 
drawn them up to the lofty heights of that star. 

Onlookers of such lives may have regarded them 
as having reached, or nearly reached, perfection, 
but they would have regarded themselves as falling 
far short of it. In the way of holiness, as in the way 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 119 

of knowledge, the farther men travel the longer seems 
the road which lies nntravelled before them. It is the 
ignorant who fancy they know. The learned discern 
how much their ignorance exceeds their knowledge. 

It may, indeed, be questioned whether for us mor- 
tals the zest would not die out of life if we felt that 
we had attained, since zest lies in the pursuit and 
not in the attainment. 

Thorwaldsen is said to have been seen looking at 
his statue of the Christ in the Cathedral at Copen- 
hagen and the tears were streaming down his face. 
Asked the reason, he replied, " I am satisfied with 
my work ; advance is no longer possible to me.'' 

When the possibility of advance in any region, 
whether of commerce or literature or science or 
art or religion, dies down in the heart the glory of 
life is over. Possibly it is so in all worlds, certainly 
it is so in our present one. 

Walter Rauschenbusch says : 

" In personal religion we look with seasoned 
suspicion at any who claim to be holy and perfect ; 
but we always tell men to become holy and seek 
perfection. We make it a duty to seek what is 
unattainable. But every approximation is worth 
while. Every step toward personal purity and 
peace, though it only makes the consciousness of 
imperfection more poignant, carries its own exceed- 
ing great reward, and everlasting pilgrimage to- 
ward the kingdom of God is better than contented 
stability in the tents of wickedness."^ 

1 Christianity and the Social Crisis, by Walter Rauschenbusch, 
pp. 362-3. 



120 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

The author of the Theologia Germanica seems to 
regard perfection as more within men's reach, for 
he says : 

" But it behoveth you to know that a master 
hath said on this passage of Dionysius [referring to 
the possibiHty of reaching perfection] that it is pos- 
sible, and may happen to a man often till he become 
so accustomed to it as to be able to look into eter- 
nity whenever he will/'^ 

It must be admitted that at first sight this goal 
seems utterly beyond our reach. When presented 
we naturally cry, "It is high ; I cannot attain 
unto it/' The very name '' God '' brings before 
us one so unutterably great that to think of becom- 
ing like Him seems quite beyond our reach. And it 
must be evident that there are elements in the per- 
fection of God out of such reach. 

It is only when His Fatherhood is emphasised as 
it is by Jesus that there seems any possibility of 
even approaching such perfection. But then the 
precept runs : '* Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father which is in heaven is perfect.'' And in a 
father the imposing elements of character fall into 
the background, and only those which allure and 
constrain are prominent. ^ And if man be indeed, as 
Jesus asserts, the child — that is, the outcome of the 
Father's life — then the idea that the child should 

1 Theologia Germanica, Golden Treasury Edition, p. 23. 

2 This is emphasised by the reading of this passage in St, 
Luke's Gospel : " Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also 
is merciful," which confines the precept to that which is ethical 
and spiritual, 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 121 

become like his Father does not seem to belong to the 
realm of the quite tmattainable. But then, this 
perfection must be regarded as within the limits of 
this relationship between Father and child, and as 
excluding in the present order of things, certain 
realms in the nature of God from the reach of men. 

I. The Realm of Knowledge, 

This age of ours is, it may be, a little over-elated 
by the knowledge it has acquired. During the last 
century, and the opening years of the present one, 
vast strides have been taken in this respect, in almost 
every direction, of the earth on which we dwell, 
and the nature of what we call matter of which it 
consists ; of the life — vegetable, animal, human — 
which exists upon it ; of the worlds of space, their 
nature, size, distances and relationship the one with 
the other. And not only of the world as it is, 
but of the world of the past and of the beings which 
then existed upon it. The secrets of the earth, 
of the heavens, of life in its various forms have been 
to a wonderful extent discovered ; and these secrets 
have not only been discovered, but they have been 
utilised by science for the benefit and comfort of men. 

So vast have been the discoveries of the last 
century that it may be we have become a little too 
proud of our knowledge. This is not to be w^ondered 
at— it is a quite natural elation. It may be that this 
has led some to the idea that nothing is beyond 
man's reach. But, great as the knowledge of man 
has become, what is it to the knowledge of God ? 
Man has been trying to discover how this earth of 



122 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

ours came into being, and up till now his conclusion — 
or perhaps it should be said his conjecture — is that 
it came out of a fire mist, or, as a recent American 
poet has described the genesis : 

'* A fire-mist and a planet — 

A crystal and a cell — 
A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And caves where cave-men dwell ; 
Then a sense of law and beauty. 

And a face turned from the clod — 
Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God." ^ 

A not imlikely conjecture — ^but, after all, only a 
conjecture — of men whose days are so few on a matter 
which is separated from them by probably millions 
upon millions of years. Man, a creature who, if he 
lives a century, is thought a prodigy, is trying to 
look back over ages upon ages to discover, if he can, 
how things began to be. But God must have been, 
in some way or other that we cannot understand, 
present at the beginning of things, if there was ever 
a beginning. In His nature must be some picture 
of the origins for which we are blindly groping. 
What man has to search out as history — written on 
the earth and humanity — God is conscious of as a 
beholder or as an experience. From His standpoint, 
therefore, probably all our discoveries are only 
approximations to truth. It may be that even those 
of which science is most sure to-day are only a little 
farther away from error than those which they 
displaced. If, side by side, we could see the best 

1 W. H. Carnith. 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 123 

that science has done, and the reahty in the mind of 
God, how vast would be the difference ! We have 
only to think of it for a moment to see that it is not 
along the line of knowledge that we can reach the 
perfection that is in God. As Owen Feltham says : 

•'* We are all fellow servants, and we know not 
how our Grand Master will brook insolences in His 
family. How darest thou, that art but a piece of 
earth that heaven has blown into, presume thyself 
into the impudent usurpation of a majesty unshaken? 

'* The top feather of the plume began to give him- 
self airs, and toss his head and look down contemp- 
tuously on his fellows. But one of them said, 
' Peace ! we are all of us but feathers ; only He 
that made us a plume was pleased to set thee as the 
highest.' " 

II. The Realm of Power. 

In this realm the present age has excelled all 
previous ones. This is so even when we remember 
the vast erections of Babylon and Egypt and other 
lands, which puzzle us to know how they were reared. 
No previous age has reached such heights of power. 
Most of the inventions foreseen by the seers of the 
past have been reached in our day. And some of 
their visions of the things that should be are very 
wonderful. In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon 
wrote — and the passage is literally translated from 
his works : 

'* For vessels may be made for navigation without 
any men to navigate them, so that ships may be 
borne on under the guidance of a single man with 



124 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

greater speed than if they had been full of sailors. 
Carriages may also be made so as to be moved with- 
out any animal force, with an incalciilable impetus/' 

After describing glasses, by which all that an 
enemy did might be discovered at any distance, he 
adds : 

" So also we might make the sun, moon, and stars 
come down lower here. Contrivances may also 
be made to walk on the bottom of the sea or rivers 
without danger to the body. Bridges also may be 
made across rivers without danger to the body. 
Machines also for flying may be made, so that a man 
seated in the middle may turn round a certain 
mechanism by which artificial wings may beat the 
air, flying like a bird." 

Bacon, however, expresses some doubt as to the 
latter marvel.^ 

I scarcely know which is the more wonderful — 
the foreseeing of Roger Bacon of the thirteenth, or 
the accomplishment in the twentieth century. And, 
naturally, the age of such accomplishment is not a 
little proud. That is, perhaps, inevitable. Man's 
doings in the age in which we now stand are indeed 
very wonderful. But what are these in comparison 
with the power which lies in the Divine Nature ? 
With long thinking and tremendous effort, men do 
accomplish great things ; but, so far as we can see, 
the great things of God come about without effort — 
but, though without effort, they quite surpass those 
of men. If Nature be the expression of the Divine 

^ Cf. Simon de Montfort, by Alfred Hayes. 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 125 

Mind, then the thought of that mind can effect 
what all the efforts of men could not. A change of 
wind will create a cold which all our fires cannot 
quite dispel, or so heat the atmosphere that all our 
fans cannot quite cool. Without apparent effort, 
the upper air may be so changed that snow descends 
in such quantity that the land becomes suddenly 
white; and not till the air grows warmer will its snowy 
covering be quite cleared. There are things in the 
Nature of God which seem beyond human reach. 
To these Jesus did not point us. Indeed, these lay 
outside the realm in which Jesus Himself moved. 
His sphere was the moral and spiritual. There, and 
there alone, was He needed. All others He left severely 
alone. The perfection to which He summ^ons us, 
then, is moral and spiritual. 

This is clear from the fact that this precept is 
the centre of a discourse that, from beginning to 
end, is of that nature, and perhaps even more 
moral than spiritual — in that it points far more to 
things to be done than things to be felt. 

And this moral sphere is open to us all — ^the 
way to perfection of this kind we may all pursue. 
Were we summoned to perfection of an intellectual 
kind we might say, '' That way is not for me, for 
my mind is not strong enough. ' ' Were we summoned 
to perfection of power, we might reply, '' That way 
is not for me ; my strength is not great enough.'' 
But to the call to a perfection that is moral, our 
hearts assure us we can and therefore ought to 
respond. 



126 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust. 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, ' Thou must,* 
The youth repHes, ' / can.^ " ^ 

In this realm response is harder to some than 
others. It is easier for some to be saints than for 
others to be passably decent. Some seem to be 
bom with a strong tendency to good. But then, 
such goodness is not really so meritorious as good- 
ness won in strife against evil tendencies. A Uttle 
good in those born of an evil stock is of more merit 
than great goodness in those with a better parent- 
age. Some, indeed, are bom at a great distance 
from this perfection, and others far on the way to it ; 
but, far or near, we all feel that we can move toward 
and even take some steps along this road, which 
is not closed, but ever open to our feet. In this 
respect, '' Not failure, but low aim, is crime." 

Cannot this be confidently said, that at this 
moral point God has more in common with man 
than at any other ? May it not be said that, God 
is in men not chiefly intellectually and energeti- 
cally. He is in them most vitally in a moral and 
spiritual sense ? 

That man is the temple of God most really in an 
ethical and spiritual sense is indicated by the Scrip- 
ture declaration that he is the Temple of the Holy 
Spirit, And it is quite certain that the bonds which 
bind us to God most closely are moral and spiritual. 
Indeed, these are the only bonds which really bind 

^ Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 127 

men to one another, as the race will sooner or later 
have to realise if it is not to be brought to an end by 
international or industrial strife. Man can, there- 
fore, at least aspire in a moral and spiritual sense 
to the perfection of God. That is the only sense in 
which the Scripture summons us thereto. In other 
senses Scripture regards God as unreachable, but 
in this sense we may be nearer to Him than we think, 
and we may press toward a still greater nearness. 
An illustration may render this a Uttle clearer. 
Here, say, is a father who is head of a vast business, 
employing thousands of men ; and here is his Uttle 
child. The child knows nothing, is not capable of 
knowing about his father's affairs or methods — here 
they are worlds apart ; but you may go into that 
manufacturer's home some evening and find him 
crawling along the ground plajdng games with that 
child. What is the tie that binds that great manu- 
facturer to that Httle child ? Not the bond of 
knowledge or of power, but of love. There, how 
close father and child are together ! And so we may 
say: 

" Oh ! how close the ties that bind 
Spirits to the Eternal Mind I " 

And that is the message of the Christian Gospel — 
that God and man, separated as to knowledge or 
power, may be close together in the realm of love. 
So that we are told '' Everyone that loveth is born 
of God and knoweth God.'' Love, then, can bridge 
the enormous distance between creature and Creator, 
even as among creatures it often bridges the great 



128 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

distance between the simplest and the profoimdest. 
As Tennyson says of the simple-minded wife mated 
to one of large knowledge : 

*' Her faith is fixed and cannot move : 
She darkly feels him great and wise, 
She dwells on him with faithful eyes : 
* I cannot understand ; I love ! ' " 

This call to perfection, then, is not up to the 
inaccessible heights of wisdom or power y but to the 
accessible heights of love which, in Fatherhood, is 
deepest of all. 

But this centrality and supremacy of Love need 
not, and should not, put knowledge quite out of 
court as is done by Robert Browning, who boldly 
stakes everything on love, leaving no place for 
knowledge in the relationship between men and God. 
Probably no poet ever trusted so exclusively to 
love. For example, in '' In a Balcony'' he exclaims : 

*' There is no good of life but love — but love ! 
What else looks good is some shade flun g from love ; 
Love gilds it, gives it worth. Be warned by me ; 
Never you cheat yourself one instant ! Love, 
Give love, ask only love, and leave the rest ! " 

And we are vastly indebted to him for pointing to 
and pressing home upon us the centrality and 
importance of love in the whole scheme of things. 
Certainly, love is the great dynamic, but a djmamic 
is powerless apart from machinery, even though it 
be of the simplest kind. And it may be questioned 
whether love can arise or exist entirely without 
knowledge. It need not be the knowledge of men 
'' by logic ruled and not at all by love '' — but 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 129 

there is a certain element of knowledge even where 
love seems to stand alone, even in " the maiden 
passion for a maid " — in love at first sight. Even 
there, is some knowledge, real or imaginary, of the 
maid who kindles the love. Love, apart from all 
knowledge, is beyond our power to conceive, just 
as when we try to conceive of spirit, strive as we 
may, w^e are compelled to clothe it with some form, 
however attenuated or shadowy ; and it is so with 
love — it can only arise in our hearts or be conceived 
of in others, associated in some way with know- 
ledge. The flame of love may bum so brightly 
as to seem only flame, but there is in it some 
fuel of knowledge without which it could not bum 
at all. 

Dr. George Matheson surely was right when he 
said : " I do not believe that moments of devotion 
are moments of mental vacancy ; the wings of the 
spirit must always be wings of thought." The 
great passage of St. John which lays such stress on 
love as the way to God, " For everyone that loveth 
is bom of God/' concludes with the declaration 
" and knoweth God,'' so that love lands us in 
knowledge, though that knowledge glows with the 
fire of love. 

*' With the heart man beUeveth unto righteous- 
ness," but, though the heart is the prompter, there 
is something to be beUeved. 

Indeed, love, apart from all knowledge, could not 
find its way or reach its goal. It would be Uke some 
great force in Nature under no law — which no force 

9 



130 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

of Nature is — and so erratic, and as likely to be 
destructive as constructive. 

Tremendous as is the insistence on love in the 
New Testament, perhaps as tremendous is its insist- 
ence on knowledge. Its call to know God is as 
insistent as its call to love Him. It declares that 
eternal life is in the knowledge of God. And, by its 
double insistence on love and knowledge, it points 
to a knowledge warmed by love, and a love illu- 
minated by knowledge. It is no refutation of this 
to say that in these high matters knowledge is 
imperfect ; this may be said of knowledge in every 
realm — of all realms it is true that we see but through 
a glass darkly ; yet in all realms some truth is 
probably reached. It may be that, in religion, truth 
is as really though not as provably reached as in 
other realms ; some would say more really reached. 
I remember how, many years ago, in a conversation 
with Sir James Paget, the renowned surgeon, he 
said : " We have more certainty than you " ; and 
then suddenly he exclaimed, ''No! we haven't as 
much certainty as you ! " 

Knowledge and love should go so closely hand 
in hand together, that knowledge shall always be 
inspired by love and love be always directed by 
knowledge. Thus, love will not follow wandering 
fires, and knowledge will keep its glow. Perhaps this 
lies at the core of the oft-quoted saying of Pascal, 
"The heart has its reasons which reason cannot 
understand '' — that is, the heart has its intuitions 
which are as reasonable for its own sphere as the 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 131 

pure reason for that in which it works. When the 
heart is allowed its proper place and influence it 
will not only give a glow to, but will get direction 
from, the mind. William Morris is right when he 
exclaims '' Love is enough " ; but the love which is 
enough cannot even be apprehended apart from the 
mind. " What God hath joined together let no 
man put asunder." 

All this, of course, proceeds on the assumption 
that the moral and spiritual are, in essence, the same 
in man and God — that when the Scripture says, 
" God so loved the world,'' it means that the love, 
though purer, is of the same nature as that which 
bears the name of love among us here on earth. And 
so with all the virtues which we call moral and 
spiritual. 

Unfortunately, this has been denied by those who 
should have been its strongest afl&rmers. Dr. Man- 
sel, once Dean of St. PauFs, declared that moral 
qualities, such as love, truth, justice, are quite 
different in their essence in God from what they are 
in men. Of course, in Him they are perfect, where- 
as in men they are far from perfect ; but the Dean 
declared that their very perfection in God altered 
their essential nature, which is very much like saying 
that a sovereign in the full pocket of a millionaire 
is essentially different from a sovereign in the pocket 
of a peasant. Happily, there were those who saw 
the fallacy of the Dean's position, amongst them 
being John Stuart Mill, the philosopher. And the 
one occasion on which I heard Cherles Kingsley 



182 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

preach — it was in the Chapel Royal, when this con- 
troversy was raging — after reading Mill's refutation 
of Mansel, in his impassioned way he exclaimed, 
" I am for the philosopher, and against the theo- 
logian ! '' If Dr. Mansel were right, we might as 
well tear up our Gospels ; for if the love in God 
spoken of in them is not love such as we feel in our 
hearts to those dear to us, they would have no 
meaning. No ! love in my heart here must be of 
the same nature as that which beats in the heait of 
God ; the only difference is that it is infinitely weaker 
and less pure, in essence it is — and must be — of the 
same kind. 

The perfection to which Jesus urges us is set 
out in detail in the Sermon on the Mount. There 
it is pictured. Perfection is the goal, but there is 
an indication of the road. As we read over these 
precepts they seem to set forth a merely human 
perfection. But what God urges upon us He 
Himself is. 

Responding, then, to His requirements, as they 
are set forth in the words of Jesus, we move along 
the road whose end is likeness to the Father. The 
road seems to lead only to a human perfectness ; 
in reality it leads to a Divine perfection, which was 
the ultimate ideal of God w^hen by His inbreathing 
man became a living soul. And in this we have 
Jesus Himself as an exemplar, who is called " the 
first-horn among 7nany hrethreny' implying that the 
after-bom may be like Him — and who showed in 
His actual life what the feeling and action of a perfect 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 133 

son to a perfect Father should be. In that life, not 
in its details, but in its spirit, not in its oriental, but 
translated into our Western setting, we may discern 
the True Leader for our lives. ^ 

Now, the road to this perfection indicated by' 
Jesus is not doctrinal — in it there is no intricate 
theory of salvation. Nor is it difficult of understand- 
ing, as Peter found many things in his brother 
Apostle Paul's arguments. All is within the under- 
standing, even of the wayfaring man, though a fool ; 
and yet along the simple road of obedience to His 
precepts we travel toward the goal indicated by 
Jesus when He says, " Be ye therefore perfect, even 
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.'' 

And, for our encouragement, it may be affirmed 
that not a few of the sons and daughters of men have 
travelled far along this road. H. M, Stanley said 
of Dr. Livingstone, '* I grant he i^ not an angel, but 
he approaches as near as the nature of a living man 
will allow." Francis William Newman, after reading 
Benson's Life of Fletcher of Madeley, said : " He 
appeared to me an absolutely perfect man." When 
Tennyson was reproached with speaking of his 
friend Arthur Henry Hallam as perfect, he replied 
that *' he was as near perfect as man could be on 
earth." Alexander John Scott said that " after he^ 
knew Mr. Erskine, he never thought of God but the 
thought of Mr. Erskine was not far away." To 
some minds such close approach of the human to the 
Divine perfection seems impossible, and the assertion 
of it lacking in humility. But if the word of Christ, 



134 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
is in heaven is perfect/' be accepted, then real 
advance along that road should be looked for, not 
only in certain souls such as I have named, but in 
a multitude of men and women of whom the world 
has never heard who actually travel this road and to 
whom Mr. Lowell's lines apply : 

" All saints — the unknown good that rest 
In God's still memory folded deep ; 

The bravely dumb that did their deed, 
And scorned to blot it with a name, 

Men of the plain heroic breed 

That loved Heaven's silence more than fame." 

It may be that one great hindrance to the pursuit 
of such perfection lies in the fact that it has so 
often been regarded as of an ecclesiastical rather 
than of a human type. By far the greater part of 
those canonised as saints have been priests or 
monks or nims. Even in Protestant circles those 
regarded as saints have often been not far removed 
from this type, and so the road seems closed to 
ordinary folk. It has not yet been realised, as it 
should be, that Christianity is essentially a lay, not 
a priestly, religion. Its founder, Jesus, was a lay- 
man, not an ecclesiastic ; all its first Apostles, save 
St. Paul (and he, though a student in a Rabbinical 
school, was not a priest), were gathered from and 
remained all their days in the ranks of the laity. It 
was only as time went on and there were departures 
from the original type that the Christian rehgion 
became priestly and ecclesiastical. 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 135 

Speaking of the latter part of the fourth century, 
Dr. Fisher says : 

" There was growing up a strong feeling that the 
clergy should stand aloof from secular life, and 
exhibit a higher form of morality than was required 
of the laity. The clergyman was thus set over 
against the layman : there w^ere two ideals of 
Christian life. This contrast tempted the one to 
a false pride in his superior sanctity, and the 
other to a dangerous contentment in mere external 
morality.'' ^ 

This soon led to the idea that sainthood was only 
possible to the clergy of the Church, and, in the 
course of time, it led on to a division between 
those who ministered in the services of the Church 
and those who led a monastic life ; the former 
being regarded and spoken of as secular and the 
latter as religious ! The higher heights of goodness 
thus came to be regarded as only attainable by 
those taking the monastic way. An illustration of 
the mischievous effects of this lately came under 
my notice. A relative was urging one of her 
domestics who belonged to the Roman Church to do 
something which was evidently right, but which 
this domestic did not want to do, although acknow- 
ledging its rightness ; but she exclaimed, '' That is 
a religion for monks and nuns, but not for me ! " 
And this distinction made by the Roman has filtered 
out into the other Churches, allowing a morality 
lower to the laity than to the clergy ; and into the 

1 The History of the Church, by Dr. G. P. Fisher, p. loi. 



136 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

larger world, leading to a distinction on a broader 
scale between things secular and things sacred — 
a distinction unknown to the mind of Jesus, and 
denounced by the Apostles, and which puts a serious 
obstacle to men at large in the way of response to 
this call of Jesus to the perfection seen in His 
Father. 

" Why should our professions and employments 
be held sacred and those of laymen be set down as 
secular ? Why should we have much more constant 
access to the means of grace than others have ? 
We may disclaim the intention, but we can hardly 
deny the fact of this broad distinction between 
clerical and lay Ufe/' ^ 

Not until Christianity is rescued from such 
priestly and ecclesiastical ideas, which divide life 
in a way which cannot be justified, which draw false 
distinctions between things secular and things 
sacred ; not until it is felt that it can run along 
simple, natural, human Unes, and cast its influence 
over life as a whole, will it accomplish the purpose 
which lay in the mind and heart of its Founder. 

Doubtless, for its preservation and diffusion in 
the world, Christianity was bound to furnish itself, 
as life always does, with an organisation which 
demanded officers by which the Kingdom of God— 
the ultimate end — should be established ; but it is 
clear, from the silence of Jesus on the matter, that 
He never contemplated any cast-iron and, therefore, 

^ Where is Christ ? by an Anglican Priest in China, p. 92. 



JESUS CALLING MEN TO PERFECTION 137 

unchangeable organisation such as the Church has 
fashioned. Clearly, He refrained from plan-making, 
that any Church which might arise should remain 
plastic, and so be able to suit itself to the various 
countries to which it would be carried, and to the 
changing ages of the world's history ; and that, 
above all, it should, as do the organisms of the 
natural world, ^A^press and not repress the life of 
which it is only the clothing. 

Forge tfulness and neglect of this quite evident 
and undeniable truth has led the Church not only 
to keep rigid its organisation, doctrine, and ritual 
in lands where it has for centuries been established — 
which, in itself was a huge mistake, since in these 
lands there have been great developments in every 
other realm — but it has resolutely carried this 
organisation, doctrine, and ritual to the lands in 
which it has sought to propagate the Christian 
Faith. The folly of this is greatest in relation to 
Eastern people, who, of necessity, must be fitter 
to imderstand a message delivered first of all to the 
East and in the Eastern idiom. It needs no argument 
to shov/ that a faith originally presented to Eastern 
peoples must be easier of comprehension to them than 
to Western peoples, whose modes of thought are so 
essentially different. 

" The Eastern mind has yet to give us its inter- 
pretation of the Christ, and the Eastern nature has 
yet to furnish us with its representation of the 
Christian Ufe, ere the revelation is complete.*'^ 

1 The Empire of Christ, by Bernard Lucas, p. 37. 



138 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

To press upon the East the organisation, doctrine, 
form, modes of worship of the West, is surely the 
height of absurdity. This has done much, especially 
in India, to hinder the progress of the Christian Faith. 
Rabindranath Tagore tells us that years ago there 
was a considerable movement in India towards 
Christianity among the educated classes led by 
Mozoomdar and Chimder Sen, but that it was 
seriously checked and almost stopped by the insist- 
ence on the part of certain Protestant missionaries 
of the doctrinal forms of the West, which, at that 
time, were of a somewhat Calvinistic type. Surely 
this is in direct opposition to the way of Jesus, 
whose wisdom shines out so clearly in the fact that 
He did not cast His thoughts in rigid doctrinal 
form, that He made no plans for His society, but 
left the great Evangel to the world shining out 
of His life, expressed by His words, and pregnant 
with His vitaUty, to clothe itself with an organism 
both doctrinal and ecclesiastical suited to the lands 
and peoples to which it should be carried. 

The Church, as well as the individual, would do 
well to respond to the noble call of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes : 

*' Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul. 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast. 

Till thou at length art free. 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea ! " 



II 

THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 

In the previous chapter stress has been laid upon 
the ethical and spiritual as the way to the perfection 
that is in the Father; but certain natiures seem 
drawn to work through other channels, through 
knowledge and even through power, that, in their 
case, these ethical and spiritual elements are not 
so evident. There are those, for example, whose 
natures seem bent on knowledge, on the pursuit 
of truth — ^that is the attitude of the finest scientific 
minds. There are others whose natures seem bent 
on the attainment of power — the best of these not 
for their own aggrandisement, but for the well- 
being and happiness of the race. It is not wise, 
therefore, to so Umit the road to the openly and 
distinctly ethical and spiritual as to exclude those 
whose way seems to lie along the Une of knowledge 
or power in the sense I have indicated, where, 
hidden in the heart, there is often the ethical and 
even spiritual element, though in forms which are 
not so evident as to be easily recognised. This has 
too often led to the closing of doors by the Church 
against men and women of the scientific type, or 

139 



140 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

those in whom the ethical and spiritual found expres- 
sion in service to men rather than in the worship of 
God. This has impoverished the Christian company 
by robbing it of many of those with great mental 
power, and of many of those strenuous natures which 
effect great things and so benefit the race. 

How different would be the position of the 
Christian Church to-day if, in the past, instead of 
frowning upon and even opposing and rejecting real 
seekers after truth in the natural world, which is 
a book of God as really as the Bible, though relating 
to a lower realm, she had kept an open mind for 
all their discoveries which were proved to be true ! 
If, for example, in earlier days the CathoUc Church, 
instead of resisting, denouncing, and persecuting, 
had accepted the proved conclusions of GaUleo ; and, 
in later times, if the whole Church, instead of taking 
up an attitude of opposition, had encouraged Lyell, 
and Darwin, and Huxley in their investigations, and 
had accepted their discoveries, recognising them as 
searchers in the realm of Nature, as her own sons 
were in the realm of Grace, how beneficent would 
have been the result ! And the benefits would have 
been mutual. The Church would have benefited by 
retaining in her company these men of science and so 
adding to her force and prestige. Thus, she would 
have become more attractive to the thinkers, espe- 
cially among the young, many of whom at present 
are repelled rather than attracted to service in her 
ministry, which is seen in the sad fact that very few 
of the Honours men in the Universities present them- 



THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 141 

selves for ordination. Beyond this, men like Lyell, 
Darwin, and Huxley, naen of the highest ethical 
character though they were, would themselves have 
benefited by the spiritual atmosphere of the Church, 
which might have kept ahve and active a part of 
their nature apt to be weakened and even withered 
by an exclusive devotion to work in the realm of 
Nature. It may be that if Darwin had not been 
repelled by the opposition of the Church to his 
discoveries, but had been encouraged in them, he 
might have been attracted to and have come into 
close contact with the Christian company. This, 
perchance, might have helped to keep alive and 
active that part of his nature which he admitted 
and deplored had withered through his exclusive 
devotion to the pursuit of natural science. Far- 
seeing observers in the Church lament her short- 
sighted action in the past, which has robbed her of 
so much power which might have been hers. The 
harm thus done in the past cannot now be undone, 
but it may be prevented in the future, and it will 
be prevented if Christian people will only learn the 
lesson taught by their Master, that His Spirit's 
mission was to lead into all truth, and, therefore, that 
all sincere seekers after truth, in the natural as well 
as in the spiritual realm, belong, though in different 
ways, to the company of Jesus. ^ 
It is certainly significant that " the Holy City 

^ " After centuries of bickering, Religion and Science at last 
have shaken hands — and if they would only go a step further 
and become fast friends, they could, by pooling their resources, 
regenerate the world." — B. H. Streeter, The Spirit, p. lo. 



142 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Jerusalem, coining down out of heaven from God, 
and having the glory of God," is described in the 
Revelation which goes under the name of St. John 
as having not one but twelve gates, four on each side, 
making it easy of access, shall we say, to the inha- 
bitants of the four quarters of the globe, or, shall we 
say, to people of widely different types ? 

It is certainly significant that in the book of a 
Jew inclined to limit blessings to his own nation 
there should be so many gates to the Holy City 
named after Jerusalem, his capital. It is not safe 
to press the imagery of a book like that of the 
Revelation, but this does seem at least to suggest 
that the Holy, which had become the Earthly City, 
might be entered by various gates suited to the 
differing natures found amongst men ! 

That man of wide outlook and insight. Dr. George 
Matheson, is in close accord with this idea of the 
many-gated city in one of his hymns : 

" Three doors there are in the temple 
Where men go up to pray, 
And they that wait at the outer gate 
May enter by either way. 

O Father, give each his answer — 

Each in his kindred way ; 
Adapt Thy light to his form of night. 

And grant him his needed day. 

O give to the yearning spirits, 

That only Thy rest desire, 
The power to bask in the peace they ask, 

And feel the warmth of Thy fire. 



THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 143 

Give to the soul that seeketh, 

'Mid cloud, and doubt, and storm. 
The glad surprise of the straining eyes 

To see on the waves Thy form. 

Give to the heart that knocketh 

At the doors of earthly care 
The strength to tread in the pathway spread 

By the flowers Thou hast planted there. 

For the middle wall shall be broken, 

And the light expand its ray, 
When the burdened of brain and the soother of pain 
Shall be ranked with the men that pray." ^ 

And there is something analogous to these many 
gates of the Holy City in the greatly differing re- 
sponse which Jesus made to those who appealed to 
Him for instruction or help. Did He ever give the 
same answer, or respond in the same way ? Too 
often His followers have had a stereotyped answer 
to all applicants, which, by constant use, has lost 
all or nearly all its meaning ; but the Master — 
did He ever repeat his prescriptions for ailing 
humanity ? 

A fairly long and wide observation of men and 
women has shown me how wise was this variety of 
method employed by Jesus, and how it was demanded 
by the great variety in the natures of men. There 
are those whose religion seems chiefly to go upward 
to God and to whom the chief thing is worship, 
reaching sometimes to ecstasy. These are the 
people who are recognised as specially reUgious. 
There are, however, others whose natures do not 

1 Cf. Worship Song, 416. 



144 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

move, or move only slightly upward to God, but 
outward to the help of their fellow-men. I once 
remarked to a dear departed friend — who belonged 
to this latter class and who often travelled hundreds 
of miles to take his place as chairman of a school 
board, " Your religion is love of education — which, 
at heart, is love of your fellow-men/' It may be 
that to the Great Father, love leading to service 
of His children is as acceptable, perchance more 
acceptable, even than worship of Himself ! 

And perhaps we may go beyond this, though I 
tremble as I do it, for fear of irreverence, and point 
to certain exceptionally gifted natures who " think 
God's thoughts after Him '' and so move along the 
way of knowledge toward Him, and even reach some 
of His secrets. For example, two centuries and a 
half ago Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of 
gravitation, which has opened so many doors into 
the great house of Nature. Here, surely, he as it 
were touched the mind of God, of which the Universe 
is an expression. And Newton has had many 
successors, some by means of the microscope dis- 
covering the secrets of the infinitesimally minute ; 
others by means of the telescope and the spectrum 
reaching up to the vastnesses and wonders of the 
worlds of space. Thus they have come into the 
region, if it be only its very outskirts, of the mind 
of God. And so knowledge has been one of the 
steps in their upward way to the Father. Through 
their toil the foregleams of poets have been shown 
to be facts of science. 



THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 145 

A hundred and twenty years ago William Blake 
wrote : 

** To see a World in a grain of sand. 
And Heaven in a wild flower. 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour." 

Most who read his words regarded them as only 
the airy dreamings of the poet, but the science of 
to-day, with its marvellous story of electrons, shows 
them to be absolutely true. And the same may 
be said of words written sixty-six years ago, in a 
now forgotten book by Henry Septimus Sutton, the 
Manchester poet : '' Matter is spirit which has lost 
its spiritual rarity and has assumed fixity and 
bound. And by Spirit or Essence, we mean the 
great Fount and Origin of all things, the Immaterial 
One of whom the worlds of the Universe are made.''^ 

Dare we include power as well as knowledge in 
men's approach to the Father ? Surely it is not 
irreverent to say that the power to which men have 
reached by means of science in the use and control 
of the vast forces of the world is, if only slightly, 
akin to the infinitely greater power of God visible 
in the Universe. 

Even if all this be granted, man's highest reach 
both in knowledge and power has been attained by 
the faculties conferred upon him, though they may 
have been only in germ, by God, whilst his highest 
attainments both in the realm of knowledge and of 
power fall imspeakably short of these in God, as 

1 Quinquenergia, p. 37. 
10 



146 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

Tennyson reminds us even of the more accessible 
ethical way : 

' ' For merit lives from man to man. 
And not from man, O Lord, to Thee." 

Yet surely it may be said that, through their 
passionate pursuit of truth, their entire response to 
what every fact they meet teaches, the men of 
science are of the number of those whom Jesus 
promised that the Spirit should lead into all truth ; 
whilst through their strenuous endeavours to 
accomplish some great work for the benefit of 
humanity — such as their researches in the realm of 
bacteriology, which have led to the mitigation of 
suffering and to the saving of countless Uves which 
otherwise would have been lost to the world — may 
we not rightly and quite reverently regard such men 
as fulfilling the prediction contained in the Fourth 
Gospel : ''He that beheveth in Me the works that 
I do shall he do also, and greater works than these 
shall he do, because I go unto the Father" ? Many 
of these discoverers may not have believed in Jesus 
in a way that would have satisfied the orthodoxy of 
the Church, which has often been leagues away from 
the teaching and spirit of Jesus ; but surely some of 
them, perhaps most of them, were moved in their 
efforts by love to humanity, which Jesus ranked 
with love to God. Surely, it is this love to humanity 
which Jesus rated so highly that has been the great 
spiritual dynamic which has given us the medicine 
and surgery that are amongst the greatest blessings 
of our time. And surely the Great Father rejoices 



THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 147 

in the sight of His children seeking and so often 
reaching the secrets hidden in the worlds both 
of Nature and Humanity which He has left un- 
revealed, not because He would conceal, but that He 
would honour men by allowing them to search and 
find, and through such searching develop their 
own powers. 

Recurring to the illustration already used of 
the great manufacturer v/ith his child, who meet 
and could mxcet then only at the point of affection ; 
yet as that child grows in years and power of 
understanding, that manufacturer-father will only 
be too glad to introduce his child to all the plans 
and even secrets of his great organisation, and, 
still later, when he is fitted for it, make him a 
partner in his vast business. 

And may we not say that the Father Spirit in 
God does not close, could not close — no true Father 
would close — any doors by which His children may 
comxC not only ever closer to Him, but be sharers 
of all He is and possesses. 

The exclusive ideas of God in the earlier portion 
of the Old Testament present only the crude con- 
ceptions of men of earlier and less developed ages. 
I refer to such incidents as the Eden story, where, 
from fear that Adam would take of the tree of life 
and live for ever, he was thrust forth from the 
garden where that tree stood ; or the Babel story, 
where, because of the growing strength of men, 
which threatened to rival and even overcome that 
of Jehovah, they were visited with confusion of 



148 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

tongues. They regarded God as a King, and, as the 
only kings they had any experience of were despots, 
jealous of any interference with their rights, God 
could only be regarded as of the same kind. 

Such ideas have been for ever put out of court 
by the higher teaching of the New Testament as to 
the Fatherhood of God, in which there is no jealousy 
of men, neither of their knowledge nor of their 
power, where the Great Father's role, like that of 
the worthy parent of earth, is not ^^ixlusive but 
inclusive, whose great desire is that His children 
should be partakers of His nature, and, therefore, 
sharers of all He possesses. 

This may seem to some like a modem and overbold 
idea, but it is in reality very ancient, since St. 
Athanasius said, " He [that is, Jesus] became man 
that we might be made God," and St. Augustine 
said, " He called men gods, as being deified by His 
grace, not as bom of His substance." It is reported 
that certain of the sages of Japan deem it not impos- 
sible that man may be allowed, in other spheres, 
to join in the creativeness of the Creator. And the 
thought of Browning runs along the same line when, 
through the mind of the Pope, he pictures man 
destined to become — 

*' Creative and self-sacrificing too, 
And thus eventually God-like (aye, 
' I have said ye are gods ' — shall it be said for naught })."^ 

And perchance what Browning makes Festus say to 
Paracelsus — man to man — might have been humbly 

* The Ring and the Book, Book X, 1382-4. 



THE OPEN DOORS OF GOD 149 

but rightly said by certain men of science — man to 
God — ^when they reached some great discovery : 

" Thou hast infused 
Thy soul in mine, and I am grand as Thou, 
Seeing I comprehend Thee, — I so simple. 
Thou so august." 



PART IV 

I 

THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 

In a previous chapter certain passages out of har- 
mony with faith in the perfect Fatherhood of God 
have been considered, and, so far as was possible to 
the writer, set in their proper Ught. But the Bible 
itself, to which men turn as the authority for their 
Faith, when wrongly regarded and interpreted, 
has often put the most serious obstacles in the way 
of many to complete confidence in the great Father- 
hood. In this and the chapters which follow the 
attempt is made to set forth what the writer 
believes is the right attitude to the Scriptures. 

What is commonly called the Holy Bible consists 
of two parts : the first, The Preparation ; the second, 
The Fulfilment, — the Old Testament, revealing the 
education of a nation for giving birth to the true 
Revealer of the Father; and the New Testament, 
describing Him and the Faith He foimded. Yet 
this bringing together of the preparation and its 
fulfilment within the covers of a single volume was 
sure to lead, and it has led, to much confusion of 
thought — ^the prepaxatory in the Old Testament 

150 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 151 

often being put on a level with the fulfilment in 
the New, whilst, beyond this, the use of these two 
parts in public worship without any distinction being 
drawn between them has led, and still leads, to 
many erroneous ideas. 

The use of parts of the book of the Jews by Chris- 
tians was inevitable and desirable, since the New 
Testament does not provide certain things they 
needed ; for example, material for praise such as 
that contained in the book of Psalms, for which 
practically no provision is m^ade in the pages of the 
New Testament, to say nothing of the rich poetic 
words of the prophets. This has led to other parts 
of the Old Testament, such as the historical books of 
Kings and Chronicles, often quite out of harmony with 
the Christian idea and feeling, being brought into 
tmsuitable use in the Christian Church, and has led 
to the Old Testament in its entirety being sent forth 
to peoples we are seeking to win to the Christian 
Faith — which is really placing before them both 
Judaism and Christianity for their acceptance, often 
to their confusion and repellence from the Christian 
Faith, whilst at home the stock objections of 
sceptical speakers and writers to the Christian Faith 
are drawn chiefly from the Old Testament. 

This has caused great confusion in the past and 
is causing it to-day to those taught by their clergy 
that the whole Book, from Genesis to Revelation, 
is the Word of God. For that astounding position 
is still held. Quite recently a vicar declared that 
'' the Bible was the Word of God from the first 



152 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelation '' ! 
For an accredited teacher of the Christian Faith to 
attribute to God all the terrible doings and sayings 
recorded in the Old Testament shows a closing of the 
mind to the light which BibUcal research has thrown 
upon the Scriptures, and, even worse, a shrinking 
from the prompting of the heart against all ascription 
of the low, mean, and cruel to the Great Father. 
It did not need the findings of what is called the 
Higher Criticism to show that much in the Old 
Testament ascribed to God is only the low and 
undeveloped estimates of men of primitive times. 

Even as a child my heart revolted against much 
that is in the Old Testament ; my heart assured me 
that all that was low, mean, and cruel was wrongly 
ascribed to God. The unsophisticated heart of the 
child is often a surer judge than the most learned 
theologian. As Jesus declared, " things hidden from 
the wise and prudent are revealed unto babes." 
And if the vicar to whom I have referred would let 
what remains in him of the child-heart speak, he 
would soon be led to worthier ideas of the Great 
Father. But, even if the child-heart in him does not 
speak, as a teacher of the people he is bound to bring 
to them every proved conclusion of Scripture 
scholars. 

Were he a physician he would be bound to know 
and act upon the latest discoveries of the bacteriolo- 
gists, which have revolutionised the science of 
medicine. To fail in this would be to fail in his 
duty in the healing art and to his patients. A 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 153 

like obligation rests upon him, as a teacher of the 
Christian Faith, to present that Faith in the fullest 
light accessible in our day. I notice that Sir A. 
MacaUster is estabhshing a post-graduate school for 
medical practitioners, to which they can resort to 
learn the latest findings of medical and surgical 
science. A similar school is sadly needed for many 
preachers, where they could hear of the new Kght 
thrown upon the Scriptures and the larger ideas of 
the Christian reUgion which have grown up in our 
day. Large numbers of those who teach from our 
pulpits to-day need themselves to be taught. 

Let me pause here for a moment to utter my pro- 
test against children in schools being led through the 
Old to the New Testament Scriptures, and being 
taught stories of God wliich are put out of court 
by the fuller and higher reveaUng of Jesus Christ. 

It is the testimony of teachers well qualified to 
judge that some of the stories of the Old Testament, 
such as the ordering of Abraham to sacrifice his 
son Isaac by Jehovah, greatly trouble many sensitive 
scholars and sometimes lead to wakeful and agitated 
nights. '' Did Isaac's mother know what was going 
to happen to him ? " questioned an eight-year-old, 
adding, " I am sure she would never have let him 
go if she knew what his father was going to do/'^ 

The Director of Religious Instruction of the 
Diocese of Manchester says : 

" From one of the healthiest and happiest of 

^ Present-day Problems in Religious Teaching, by Hetty Lee, 
P- 73. 



154 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

schools, after the story had been told by one of the 
gentlest and kindest of teachers, a little boy went 
home, and in the evening, as he sat by the fire, wept 
disconsolately for an hour or more, as he thought 
over the story of the morning. Others have shown 
in other ways that the story has done them harm in 
the mental and spiritual impression it has made, 
and mothers have asked that their Uttle ones should 
not be told the story again." 

A child taught on the old lines remarked one day 
to his mother apropos of these Old Testament 
stories, " God has improved since then, hasn't He, 
mother?"^ 

I fail utterly to see why ethically imperfect 
representations of God, which need all the teacher's 
skill to explain, the explanations being often for- 
gotten and the story remembered, should be taught 
to children at all, for they woimd their young and 
sensitive hearts, and, though their wounds may be 
healed, the scars often remain all the after-life. 
Why should not children be taken direct to the higher 
vision of God presented by Christ ? This surely 
should be the first, and so the most abiding impression 
made on their young minds. Let that first be fixed, 
and the less worthy visions of the Old Testament, 
when afterwards read, will not matter much. Let 
the child's mind be first and firmly fixed on the 
revealing of God through Jesus Christ •; let its mind 
be fully persuaded that God is the sum of all per- 
fection ; and then, later on, it may roam over the 

1 The Child's Knowledge of God, by the Rev. T. Grigg Smith, 
M,A., pp. 43. 77. 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 155 

broad fields of the Old Testament Scriptures, rejoic- 
ing in and gathering around its vision of God every 
beautiful word of psalmist and prophet ; and 
beyond this absorbing all the literary charm of the 
Authorised Version, made when our English lan- 
guage was at its purest and most melodious ; but 
always free to roam in these Old Testament fields 
without the quite needless and false idea that 
everything there is literally, vitally, and eternally 
true of the Great Father. 

That wise man George MacDonald was once 
asked by my wife to write a book on the Old Testa- 
ment history. He refused, for, said he, ''I never 
teach it to my own children.'' Why should children 
be taken to the twiUght of the Old v/hen the noonday 
of the New Testament may and should at once be 
theirs ? 

It needs to be more clearly perceived that the 
treasure is in an earthen vessel, but that the treasure 
itself, whxich is ** the hght of the knowledge of the 
glory of God, is in the face of Jesus Christ.'' 

A lady friend once said to me, '' I feel very 
wicked because I do not like certain parts of the 
Bible." I repUed, " Neither do I — the warUke parts 
of the Old Testament, the Imprecatory Psalms, the 
Song of Solomon, furnish no religious uplift or 
inspiration to me." And then I added, '' A friend 
invites you to dinner ; does he say, * Of every dish 
in every course you must partake, or out you 
go ! ' ? Does he not rather say, ' Take what suits 
your constitution? '" This is the proper way to 



156 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

use the feast provided in the Scriptures. Take 
what ** finds you/' to use the pregnant phrase of 
Coleridge, and be undisturbed by the rest. Or, as 
Dr. Wicksteed asks, '' What if we were to try the 
Christian tradition itself ? — ^not by the strength of 
its claira to dominate the human spirit, but by the 
depth of the response it wakes in us ? " " O testi- 
mony of the soul, Christian by its very nature ! '' 
cried Tertullian. Or, as he further says, " When 
men strive to maintain the credit of beUefs, the 
sincerity of which has faded, for the sake of retaining 
the treasures associated with them, they are cutting 
the very roots from which the sap of health and 
vitality flows, and are striving to keep the living 
by chaining them to the dead.'' ^ 

" On the other hand, if living truth has once been 
found and has recorded itself in living utterance, its 
power depends, not on the history that tells us how 
it was reached, but on the ' Testimony of the Soul/ 
that tells us what it is."* 

In this respect inclination or the desire to go one's 
own wild way, or to yield to the lower cravings, must 
not be allowed to turn one from a single word of 
Scripture which commends itself to the conscience as 
in the sight of God, To turn from such would be 
to do harm to one's true nature. Every word of 
Scripture that is to us " quick and powerful, and 
pierces to the dividing asunder of joints and marrow 
and is a discemer of the thoughts and intents of the 

^ Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy, p. 560. 
* Ibid., p. 562, 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 157 

heart '' ^ must be accepted, or there will be infinite 
loss and harm to the soul. Even Whittier, who 
had so clear a vision of the love of God, saw that 
that love does not bend down to our low ideals or 
desirings, but stands firm and abiding to draw 
us up thereto : 

"For ever round the Mercy-seat 

The lights of Love shall quenchless bum ; 
But what, if habit-bound, thy feet 
Shall lack the will to turn ? 

What if thine eye refuse to see, 

Thine ear of Heaven's free welcome fail ? 

And thou a willing captive be, 
Thyself thy own dark jail ? 

Oh doom beyond the saddest guess, 
As the long years of God unroll. 

To make thy dreary selfishness 
The prison of a soul I 

To doubt the Love that fain would break 
The fetters from thy self-bound limb. 

And dream that God can thee forsake 
As thou forsakest Him I" a 

Or, as David Attwood Wasson says : 

" Not to content our lowness, but to lure 
And lift us to your angelhood. 

Do your surprises pure. 

Dawn far and sure 
Above the tumult of young blood. 

And, star-like, there endure.*'^ 

1 That passage does not refer, as many think, to the written, 
but to the living Word of God, by His Spirit whose action it so 
accurately describes. 

8 Worship Song, 494. 

8 The Treasury of American Sacred Song, p. 139. 



158 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

And, if we are wise to our soul's good, we shall 
not choose just those Scriptures which only soothe 
us, but also those which stir our natures to the pur- 
suit of the highest ethical and spiritual ideals. 

What portions of Scripture forna the real Bible 
of my readers I cannot tell ; but I will hazard the 
conjecture that in most if not all cases there would 
be in the Old Testament certain parts of the Psalter 
and of the Prophets, and in the New Testament 
the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Prodigal 
Son, the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel which 
goes under the name of St. John, and St. Paul's 
great Ijnric of love. All these passages run along 
the line of that Perfect Fatherhood of God of which 
these pages treat, and they bear their meaning on 
their face and have more of the character of poetry 
than prose. In such passages we find the comfort 
and direction our souls crave. These and other 
passages of a like kind are to all intents and purposes 
our real Bible. Were I to turn over the pages of 
any continually used Bible, I should find those 
containing these and similar passages thumb-marked 
or worn with use. To such parts we turn when 
our souls need direction, sustenance, or comfort, 
or when trouble or sorrow falls on our path. 

I should not find similar marks of frequent use 
in the books of Kings or Chronicles, which tell of the 
wars of Israel. And it may be I should not find 
such marks even in the New Testament at the 
intricate arguments of St. Paul. Our favourite 
passages are not those which tax our mind to unravel 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 159 

or understand. They are such as he who runs 
may read. Simplicity, picturesqueness, appeal to 
the heart, are their chief characteristics. These 
are the qualities which go to make up the Bible 
we love, our real Bible. We may profess to like 
a whole Bible, but such parts as I have described 
form our real Bible. 
Auguste Sabatier says : 

*' In the presence of texts which produce no effect, 
or which might even prove dangerous if the letter 
were blindly followed, you say that the authority 
of the Bible has no force. Where its influence is of 
slight importance you esteem its authority small, 
where it is convincing, luminous, regenerating, and 
sanctifying you attribute to it even divine authority. 
But where do you find the criterion by which you 
establish these degrees and justify these differences ? 
Is it not in your Christian consciousness illuminated 
by the light of the Spirit ? There is a diamond 
in the book, a life-draught in the vase of clay. 
But you do not value the case equally with the jewel, 
nor the clay as the liquor.'' ^ 

A few guiding principles in our use of the Bible 
may perhaps be helpful to certain minds. 

And chiefly this, that the standard for the Christian 
Faith is to be found, not in the Old, but in tho New 
Testament, The Old is the book of Judaism, the 
New Testament that of Christianity. That seems 
to need neither proof nor argument, but it has been 
to a large extent overlooked in practice by those who 

^ The Religions of A uthority and the Religions of the Spirit, by 
Auguste Sabatier. ^p. 276-8. 



160 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

say they like a whole Bible, and by many sections 
of the Church, which place passages of the Old 
and New Testaments before their congregations 
without any indication as to the different levels on 
which they stand, and no guidance as to the higher 
authority, for Christians, of the New over the Old 
Testament. Sensitive worshippers often suffer a jar 
to their feelings when in the same service the 
first lesson from the Old Testament presents stories 
or sentiments of a far lower ethical and spiritual 
type than the second lesson from the New Testament, 
suffused with the far higher spirit of Jesus. It is 
surely to the last degree desirable that the distinction 
between the Old, or Judaic, and the New Testament 
or Christian should be made clear to listeners in 
the services of the Church. 

The need for attention being fixed on the Gospels 
as the essential documents of the Christian Faith 
was finely enforced some years ago by an incident 
at Oxford. An undergraduate was about to begin 
the study of theology, and he sought the advice 
of Dr. Routh, who had attained to a venerable age 
and was regarded as the patriarch of the University 
of Oxford. To his appeal for advice, this venerable 
man, speaking in low and measured tones and with 
long intervals between his sentences, said : " There 
is an ancient work which goes by the name of the 
Gospel according to St. Matthew. I think I should 
advise you to read that.'' Then, after a long pause, 
*' There is an ancient work which goes by the name 
of the Gospel according to St. Mark ; I think I should 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 161 

advise you to read that '' ; the same being repeated 
till all the Gospels had been recommended. Could 
better advice have been given ? For, surely, to 
know any faith, or, indeed, any subject, it is wisest 
to go to its original sources. 

Theriy beyond this, in the New Testament, the words 
of Jesus must be regarded as supreme. If He is the 
Light of the World, then His words must be the 
clearest expression of that Light. This has too often 
been overlooked, and the words of the Apostles found 
in the Epistles of the New Testament have been 
lifted to a level with those of Christ ; indeed, by 
some they have been lifted above them and regarded 
as a fuller expression of the essence of the Christian 
Faith. ^ The Apostles, if they were here, certainly 
Paul, would vigorously reject such a method, as his 
words clearly show : *' Who, then, is Paul, and who 
is Apollos, but ministers [servants] by whom ye 
believed ? " Surely, to any open and candid mind, 
in the words of Christ we have the thinnest veil 
between us and the Eternal; in the case of the 
Apostles there is an added veil woven all uncon- 
sciously by the minds of the Apostles, and some- 
times rendered denser by ideas imbibed in their 
earUer days from the behefs, especially the apoca- 
lyptic ones, then current around them. And yet, so 
strange is sometimes the working of the theologic 
mind, that the very persons who assign to Jesus 

1 My old friend Edward White strenuously affirmed that the 
real Christian Faith was to be found in the Epistles rather than 
in the Gospels I 

II 



162 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

a place on the throne of the universe lift the 
words of the Apostles to a level higher than His. 
If the New Testament declaration be accepted 
that Jesus is the Revealer of the Father, then it 
follows that in the Revealer' s words we come nearest 
to Him whom He revealed. 

Another guiding principle is well expressed in the 
lines of Lord Houghton (Monckton Milnes) : 

*' Mohammed's truth lay in a Holy Book, 
Christ's in a sacred life. 

So, while the world rolls on from change to change. 

And realms of thought expand. 
The letter stands without expanse or range, 

StifE as a dead man's hand. 

While, as the life-blood fills the glowing form. 

The Spirit Christ has shed 
Flows through the ripening ages fresh and warm, 

More felt than heard or read. 

The tide of things rolls onward, surge on surge. 

Bringing the blessed hour 
When in Himself the God of Love shall merge 
The God of Will and Power." 

" It was not His will that His religion should be, 
like Islam, the religion of a book. He wrote His 
message on the .hearts of a few faithful men, where 
it was not to be imprisoned in Hebrew or Greek 
characters, but was to germinate, like a seed in 
fruitful soil : ' The words which I have spoken 
to you,' says the Johannine Christ, ' They are spirit, 
and they are life.' " ^ 

^ Faith and its Psychology, by Dr. Inge, p. 12Z. 



THE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO THE WORD 163 

That keeps before us the great fact that Jesus is 
the clearest spoken Word of God we mortals have 
yet received. It may be His consciousness that not 
a written, but a Living Word, would be the Life and 
Light of men, led Him to give no instructions to 
prepare any record. That shows how deeply He 
was assured that the Life He had quickened among 
men would go on influencing and guiding their lives. 
And such is the power of Life, that it may be it would 
have gone on doing so through the ages. This 
assurance is probably involved in the fact that 
Jesus never promised or ordered or provided for 
a written Gospel, but promised with greatest emphasis 
the Spirit to guide into all truth. But what Jesus 
never prepared for nor ordered was sure, in the very 
nature of things, to be brought about — the story was 
sure to get written, otherwise His life and words 
might have gradually grown dim ; but the refraining 
from any instructions to make a record surely 
indicated how Jesus felt that, by a life in harmony 
with the will of God rather than by any book which 
might afterwards come into being. He was unveiling 
the Father. And when it is realised, as it should 
be, that Jesus on earth was the temporal symbol 
of an eternal Divine reality, then the Record will be 
kept in its proper place, out of which it is too often 
taken by imthinking minds. 

" We study and we teach what Christ was and did 
for our predecessors, rather than what He is and 
does for our contemporaries. We hold to what He 
said then, and hardly expect to hear Him say any- 



164 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

thing fresh to-day. The Word of God that the 
prophets heard we read in books. The very phrase 
' the Word of God ' becomes technaUsed and limited 
to the record of His words to the Jews.''^ 

Rabindranath Tagore is surely right when he says : 

" The reUgion that comes to us from external 
Scriptures never becomes our own ; our only tie 
with it is that of habit. To gain religion within is 
man's great Ufe-long adventure." 

And Dr. Deissman shows fine insight when he says : 

" Book religion, even historically considered, is 
legal religion ; its associations are with technicality/'* 

If that be always kept in mind we shall not 
sink down to Bibliolatry — ^the putting of a book 
where Christ only should stand — ^the caring more 
for what we believe than whom we believe ; but our 
minds and hearts will, as Lord Houghton suggests, 
be bound not to a holy book, but to a sacred Life — 
the Life which is the light of men. 

^ Where is Christ ? by an Anglican Priest in China, p. 72. 
2 Deissman, quoted by Moffatt in The Historical New Testa- 
ment, p. 259. 



II 

THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 

That the message of the Gospel reaches us in the 
pages of a Ubrary — which, rather than a book, the 
Bible is — creates a great peril, since, to many, it gives 
birth to the idea that all in this library is the object 
of faith. This tends to associate with God, seen in 
the face of Jesus, a number of things which have little 
or nothing to do with vital Christianity, such as the 
mode and period of the world's origination, the 
history of a particular nation, and many other things 
which might be named, which, in the very nature 
of things, cannot be the object of a faith which 
is really reHgious. And so it often comes to 
pass that, when science comes along and shows 
that certain of the statements in the Bible about 
these extraneous objects are not in harmony with 
fact, the foundations of faith to many seem to be 
sKpping away. These extraneous things, through 
being recorded in the library of books we call the 
Bible, have become so associated with the Gospel 
that they seem to be a part of that Gospel, when all 
the while they are neither essential nor vital to its 
message. It is very significant that, in the second 

165 



166 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

epistle to Timothy, the author exclaimS; '* I know 
whom I have beUeved, and am persuaded that He 
is able to preserve that which I have committed 
imto Him/' He does not say, " I know what I have 
believed." His faith goes out to '' Him whom " he 
beUeved. Faith, when it is of the right kind, is 
always fixed on the whom — it has onCy not many, 
objects. When people declare that the story of 
Jonah as factual is vital to the Christian Faith, or 
when a great preacher declares that if the authen- 
ticity of the book of Daniel were overthrown his 
faith in Christianity would be overthrown, I marvel 
that they should have so learned — or, rather, mis- 
learned — Christ, and should have so departed not 
only from His clear teaching but from that of the 
first Apostles and the example of the first Christians. 

And the harm done when such an attitude becomes 
known is great, since it tends to turn away many who 
would be attracted if the one true object of faith — 
God reflected in Jesus — were presented to them. 
Many who tmn away from the vast collection of the 
Old Testament would be attracted were they left 
alone with Jesus as the great Revealer of God. 

On this matter there is the clear and explicit 
witness of the New Testament. Take whatever view 
we may of the actual story of the Transfiguration, 
there shines out of it the unmistakable belief of 
the earliest age of the Church's history — ^that Jesus 
is the great revealer of the heart of God, for on that 
mount, with Moses the representative of the Law, 
and Elias, the representative of the Prophets — ^both 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 167 

together standing for the Old Testament Scripture — 
there sounds out the emphatic declaration concern- 
ing Jesus : " This '' — ^not Moses nor Elias — ** is 
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear 
ye Him/' And the three chosen Apostles then pre- 
sent learnt the lesson, for in after-days they were 
preachers, not of Moses and Elias with Jesus, but of 
Jesus alone. 

It may also be very seriously questioned whether 
the study of the poUtical relationships of Israel with 
other nations, and especially her warlike conflicts 
with Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, and Persia, recorded 
in the Old Testament, have any real religious uplift 
for readers in these days. Because the story of these 
is contained in the Bible many people fancy that, 
in studying them, they are engaged in a specially 
devotional exercise, whilst, all the while, they are 
only engaged in an historical study, which is no more 
religious than the study of the history of their own 
or of any other nation. Inclusion in the Bible does 
not give any exceptional sanctity to such studies, 
and, indeed, the study of wars between nations tends 
rather away from, than towards, true religion. Here 
and there in the historical books of the Old Testa- 
ment may be found moral and spiritual precepts and 
warnings from the prophetic souls who regarded their 
events from a high standpoint ; but the body of such 
warlike history not only tends to awaken the warlike 
spirit, but to turn the mind away from the central 
and vital truths of spiritual religion. 

The ill effect of such study of the Old Testament 



168 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

is seen in the case of the Puritans, who were more 
frequent readers of the Old than of the New Testa- 
ment, which is shown not only in their more numerous 
quotations from the Old than the New Testament, 
but in the frequent conferment of the names of Old 
Testament characters on their children. As a matter 
of fact, the religion of the Puritans was more allied 
to Judaism than Christianity. Hence it is that, in 
spite of their great virtues and the great services 
they rendered to their nation, their religion was lack- 
ing in those gentler virtues extolled and enforced 
in the pages of the New Testament, and this did 
much to bring about the revolt of the Enghsh nation 
from Puritanism at the time of the Restoration. 

There were, of course, noble exceptions to this, 
but no one can read the story of the Puritans, both 
in England and in North America, without keen 
regret at their hardness both in thought and action — 
leading, as this did in North America, to a great 
revolt from what they considered orthodoxy, an 
orthodoxy which out-Calvined Calvin. Revolt from 
this drove some of the finest minds into that Uni- 
tarianism out of which sprang the foremost wiiters 
of New England. 

The study of the histoiical parts of the Old Teita- 
ment leads, and naturally leads, to a reUgion more 
Judaic than Christian, whilst, beyond this, the time 
spent on such history might better be devoted to the 
history of our own times. The policies of the Jewish 
nation belong to a long-pa^^t age which no efforts 
of ours can alter. The politics and international 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 169 

relationships of our own time belong to a realm 
where we may exert some small influence. 

I remember to have read somewhere how the late 
Dr. R. W. Dale of Birmingham pleaded for a study 
of our present-day EngUsh history, on the ground 
that, if we have only eyes to see it, God is in it quite 
as surely as in that of Israel. It is to the last degree 
imbelieving to fancy that God is only in the history 
of the ancient, and not in that of the modem world. 
A Living God must belong to the present quite as 
fully as to the past. He must be as active now as in 
ages which through the lapse of centuries have grown 
dim to our eyes. When prophetic spirits nov/ arise, as 
they often do, they see the action of His eternal laws 
quite as clearly in the modem as in the ancient world, 
and the action of those laws to-day is of more con- 
sequence to us than their action long centuries ago. 

No verses of Francis Thompson are truer, or have 
gone more home to men, in spite of their awkward- 
ness, than the closing stanzas of his poem, ** The 
Kingdom of God '' : 

" The angels keep their ancient places ; — 
Turn but a stone, and start a wing ! 
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces. 

That miss the many-splendoured thing. 

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 

Cry ; — and upon thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder 

Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross. 

Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter, 
Cry, — clinging Heaven by the hems, 

And lo, Christ walking on the water 
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames I '* 






170 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

And Thomas Hornblower Gill, that keen student 
of history and writer of very noble hymns, gives 
expression, with a fine lyric glow, to the same con- 
viction of the equal nearness of God to our age as 
to any past one when he says : 

" Not, Lord, Thine ancient works alone, 
Thy wonders to past ages shown. 

Make our glad spirits glow I 
Our eyes behold Thy works of might ; 
On us full beam Thy wonders bright ; 

The Living God we know. 

We joy, not only to be told 
How with Thy saints and seers of old 

Thou madest sweet abode : 
We of Thy presence bright can tell ; 
Thou in Thy living saints dost dwell : 

We feel the Living God. 

Within, Thy presence music makes ; 
Forth from our lips the rapture breaks ; 

A strain divine we raise ; 
Thou sendest down this heavenly fire, 
This very song Thou dost inspire ; 
The Living God we praise. 

Thou settest us each task divine ; 
We bless that helping hand of Thine, 
This strength by Thee bestowed : 
Thou minglest in the glorious fight ; 
Thine own the cause ! Thine own the might I 
We serve the Living God " ^ 

This keen sense of a Living God, whose laws are 
working in the world to-day, as really as in ancient 
days, would lead us to regard the politics and inter- 
national relationships of to-day as quite as sacred, 

1 Worship Song, 778. 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 171 

and, indeed, a more profitable study than those of 
any far-off time. 

A Christian man is, therefore, better occupied in 
the careful study, by the best lights he can find, of 
the home and foreign politics of to-day than in 
trying to trace out the poUtics and international 
relationships of Israel long centuries ago, even if he 
does this under the illuminating guidance of the 
books of Sir George Adam Smith. Let him, by 
all means, absorb all that the Hebrew prophets 
have to say of spiritual and ethical moment; 
but, even it he should succeed in mastering the 
intricate relationships of Israel with other nations, 
which very few do, since all these belong to a past 
whose history has but small influence on the present, 
he is much better employed in mastering the rela- 
tionships of the nations to-day, on which it is his 
duty to exert what influence he may possess. 

I remember how, in my college days, when Dr. 
Newman Hall, then a well-known London minister, 
who had been invited to spend the day with the men, 
was asked to give advice as to the best way of 
preparing for preaching, he rephed, '' Read your 
Greek New Testament, and the Times newspaper " 
— ^by which he meant the Greek Testament to 
learn the message to be delivered, the Times nev/s- 
paper to understand the age to which the hearers 
belong. 

To follow that advice would be to preach the true 
Christian religion contained, not in the Old, but in 
the New Testament, and to avoid that foolish 



172 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

antiquarianism which has so long been, and in some 
quarters still is, the bane of the Church. 

Such a serious study of the politics, home and 
foreign, of to-day, being gradually diffused by such 
students, would lead to greater intelligence on such 
subjects among the people at large, and would do 
much to give us wiser legislation at home and 
better relationships with other nations, and so be 
one factor in bringing nearer the Kingdom of God, 
which the world so sorely needs to cure its great 
and widespread evils. 

At the present moment, for example, it is far more 
important to study the famine, with its resulting 
disease, now raging in Russia, and how it may 
be alleviated, than to study the famine in Samaria, 
long centuries ago, for here our thought may and 
should lead to the effort to relieve, whereas the 
Samaria famine can only be a matter for study 
and not for action. 

A similar attitude is needed in relation to the 
biographical parts of the Bible, especially of the 
Old Testament. It is surely time that discourses 
in the Church should not be limited, as, for the most 
part, they have been, to the lives recorded in the 
pages of Scripture. It is evident that the writer of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews did not approve of such 
limitation, for, after giving a long Hst of the heroes of 
faith in the Old Testament, he concludes with these 
remarkable words . '' And these all, having obtained 
a good report through faith, received not the 
promises, God having provided some better thing 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 173 

for us, that they without us should not be made 
perfect/' Evidently there was in his mind the idea 
that the list he presented of the men of faith should 
not be regarded as a closed one, but that it should 
be ever receiving additions as the ages passed along. 

Julius Charles Hare, in his book The Victory of 
Faith, acts upon this, and continues the list of the 
men of faith from the point it closes in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, and, with fine touches^f biographical 
description, brings it down to the year 1840, in which 
his book was published. And so he indicates that the 
study of the Church should not be confined to the 
biographies of men and women in the pages of 
Scripture, but should be extended to those who, by 
their lives, showed that they were true successors 
of those whose record is in the Scriptures. 

Too often the Church has regarded the Canon 
of Sacred Biography as closed, like the Canon of 
Scripture ; but lives quite as saintly, and, therefore, 
quite as worthy of study, have been lived in post- 
Biblical as in Biblical times. It is quite an unbeUev- 
ing idea to think that the early fruits of the tree of 
faith were the only, or even the finest, ones. A tree 
exhausted by its first fruit-bearing, or whose first 
fruits were its finest, would scarcely be worth pre- 
serving. It may be confidently aflirmed that its 
later and even its latest, fruits are quite equal — per- 
haps, in some senses superior — ^to its earlier ones. 
Indeed, the tree of life, when nourished by the breath 
and spirit of Christ should produce, and has pro- 
duced, fruits far finer than those of pre-Christian 



174 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

times. The post-New Testament ages can show 
characters as ChristUke as those of the age recorded 
in the New Testament. The world to-day has saints 
whose sainthood is as real as that even of the 
Apostles. It would be a poor Faith whose fruits 
grew poorer as the ages went on. And, if this be 
so — and I am sure that it is — then the study 
of modem Christian hves is quite as legitimate as 
that of New Testament biography, and far more 
profitable than that of Old Testament biography. 

Beyond this, such study has certain advantages. 
The materials for it are fuller. For the study of 
most of the scriptural lives the materials are to the 
last degree meagre. How slight is our information 
concerning even the outstanding names of the New 
Testament, such as St. John or St. Peter ! St. 
Paul's is the only life recorded in any detail. For 
a multitude of modem saints we have detailed 
and adequate biographies. The material for the 
preacher is, therefore, richer, and so his discourse 
may be made more interesting. 

Moreover, the saints of the modem world are 
nearer to us — their environment is more like our 
own, and so their careers can be more easily appre- 
hended. 

And the study of their lives, so much nearer to us, 
and set in a similar environment to our own, natu- 
rally bears in upon our minds the conviction that 
saintliness is as possible in the modem as in the 
ancient world, and so helps to get rid of the idea, all 
too widely spread, that saintliness, to be real, must 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 175 

be antique ; whilst, beyond all this, the study of 
such lives would have a freshness which would tend 
to interest and hold the attention of hearers. If 
truth must be told, hearers often grow somewhat 
tired of hearing the story of the Biblical lives, and 
when the story begins they are apt to settle them- 
selves down and say, '' We know all about them J* 
A lady friend tells me that, when teaching a class in 
a ragged school; and she said that the lesson would 
be about Abraham, a tiny child looked at her and 
said, '* We know all about Im/' He had the 
courage to say out what many listeners in church 
think but do not say ! In many cases the materials 
for the study of Scripture characters are so scanty 
that the speaker has to draw very largely on his 
imagination. He is in the position of the Israelites, 
who had to make bricks without straw — as my 
friend Benjamin Waugh had to do when he wrote a 
book on The Childhood of Jesus, concerning which 
the actual information does not extend beyond two 
or three sentences in the New Testament. 

But when attention is called to more modem Uves, 
which may be quite as saintly as the ancient ones, 
there is the advantage which the lecturer has 
who tells his hearers of something which they did 
not know before, and so more easily holds their 
attention. Such a method might do something to 
render services more interesting, since one great 
cause for the diminishing attendance at church 
is that its services do not interest — they are often set 
in a too-far-off environment, and so do not come home 



176 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

to men's business and bosoms. The Great Teacher 
found subjects of discourse in what was actually 
passing before the eyes of His hearers — in the sower 
sowing his seed, in the birds of the air or the flowers 
of the field. There was nothing of the antiquarian 
in his method, as in that of the Scribes and Pharisees, 
and we are told that the common people heard 
Him gladly. A reversion to His method might have 
a hke result, as, indeed, where it is adopted it does 
have. 

All this seems to need no proof or argument, and 
yet, when the effort has been made to draw on the 
rich stores of modem biography for the enrichment 
of the services of the church, so strongly rooted is 
the idea that all instruction should be drawn from 
the pages of the Bible, for which there is no warrant 
in Scripture, so widespread is this Bibliolatry, that 
the greatest opposition has often been raised. I 
believe I was the first to move out into this larger 
realm when some forty years ago I delivered a series 
of Sunday evening lectures on *' TJie Christian Life 
as seen in Modern Biography." Appeal was made 
to the editor of a widely read religious newspaper to 
stop such a proceeding. Happily, he was broader- 
minded, and approved and commended rather than 
condemned. He even went beyond this, and wel- 
comed to one of the papers he owned the biographical 
discourses which from time to time I delivered.^ 

1 Biographical references were often introduced into what were 
called Funeral Sermons. In those earlier days it seemed fitting 
to refer to those who had just died ; indeed, some of the finest 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 177 

A beautiful life lived in the nineteenth or twentieth 
century is just as worthy of study as such a one 
lived in the first age of Christianity. Inclusion in 
Scripture would not add to nor does exclusion there- 
from detract from, its worthiness. Distance may 
lend enchantment to the view, but if it does it is 
a false, not a true enchantment. If St. Francis of 
Assisi, Fletcher of Madeley, and John Woolman had 
happened to live in the first age of Christianity, 
their names and characters might have gained 
inclusion in the New Testament record, and so they 
might have become subjects of discourse; but they 
would have been not a whit the worthier on that 
account. It is surely time that inclusion in the 
Book should not be regarded as rendering Uves 
worthier, or exclusion from it as rendering them 
less worthy in our eyes. The saint is not made 
by the record, nor unmade by being left out of it. 
Canonisation by the Church does not make, but only 
recognises the saint, and there are far more saints 
uncanonised than canonised, to say nothing of the 
fact that often the canonised were not specially 
worthy of such honour. If our eyes were open we 
should discern saints without canonisation to direct 
us, for real goodness forms a living epistle known and 
read of all men, as St. Paul declared. Mr. Ruskin 
tells us that the greatest thing we can do is to see, 
and the greatest thing to be seen, far greater than 

specimens of pulpit oratory are to be found in such sermons ; but, 
these apart, it would be difficult, if not impossible, before our 
own times, to find sermons on lives outside the Biblical record. 

13 



178 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

anything in earth or sky, great as these are, is a 
beautiful human Uf e. BUnd indeed are we if we can- 
not recognise such beauty when it comes within our 
range, whether it be clothed in the robe of sanctity 
or of common life, whether its dress be that of wealth 
or of poverty, for '* the cowl does not make the 
monk '' nor dress of any kind the saint. 

And what appUes to Biography applies to History. 
The Acts of the Apostles is but the opening chapter 
of the history of the spread of Christianity in the 
world, and all true missionary work should be 
regarded as a continuation of that history. Robert 
Moffatt was just as truly the apostle to the Bechuanas 
as St. Paul was to the dwellers in Asia Minor. 
Henry Martjoi was quite as real an apostle to Persia 
as St. Peter to those of the Circumcision. James 
Chalmers, the " Great Heart of New Guinea,'' as 
Robert Louis Stevenson called him, who laid down 
his life for the natives of New Guinea he loved so well, 
belongs to the noble army of martyrs just as truly 
as any of the Apostles. But nearness to our own 
age often robs them, which it should not do, of the 
halo which is their due. 

One of the most impassioned pieces of eloquence 
I ever remember to have heard was from the lips 
of Dr. Robert Vaughan, a really great orator, just 
after the persecution of the Christians and the 
martyrdom of many of them in Madagascar, when 
he claimed that the story formed the latest and 
noblest addition to the Acts of the Apostles, of 
which it should be regarded as a continuation. 



THE PERILS OF BIBLIOLATRY 179 

It is surely the height of blindness to discern the 
noble only in the far-off, and to miss it in that which 
is near. 

It is true far-off-ness may and does hide whilst 
nearness reveals the faults which cling even to the 
best ; but in the far-off, as in the near, they are 
really present, as we should probably have dis- 
covered if w^e had lived under the same roof as the 
Apostles or those now bearing the name of saints. 
It is easy to be admirers of the saints already canon- 
ised, but it takes a little discernment to perceive the 
saints around us doing, it may be, ordinary work in 
ordinary dress ; just as it is easy to praise authors 
who have become classic, but it needs a far keener 
insight to discover and praise authors who deserve 
to be, but have not yet become, classic. 

But that man must be in a very poor environment 
who does not discern beautiful and even saintly lives 
therein. Certainly, in my own case, I could compile 
a considerable hst of men, and still more of women, 
deserving place in the saintly company, and whose 
characters, if they had their due, would be worthy 
of study and imitation — a study which would help 
to kill that antiquarianism which is the great bane 
of the Church, and at whose heart hes utter unbeUef 
of the faith professed and of the livingness of God 
by whose gracious influence such Lives are lifted to 
holy levels just as truly, and far more numerously 
to-day, than in the so-called, but falsely called, ages 
of faith. If the Christian influence did not make 
saints to-day, not of the ascetic or cloistral, but of the 



180 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

human type, men and women doing their ordinary 
work in a beautiful spirit, I should be in sore danger 
of losing my faith in Christianity. Lives thus lived 
are indeed one great support to my faith — the fruits 
are a proof to me of the goodness of the tree. 

Margaret Gilbert Dickinson's words are worthy 
of remembrance, for they set forth a fact largely 
overlooked by the Church : 

'* Not cloistered saints that bid the world 

Remember they forget — its lure defy, 
Whose abnegating robes accost the glance 

Of lost humanity ; 
Not they whose moving lips attest 

Repeated prayer, to shame the throng or mart. 
Whose fingers outward clasp a crucifix ; 

Not they who stand apart — 
Are Thy swift followers alone, 

Sweet Christ I Unveiled, untonsured, they there be 
Who hold their mired brothers to their heart. 

Even for love of Thee, 
Who didst remember to the end 

Thy world, though they had Thee forgot and fled — 
A hillside Calvary Thy holy lot. 

Mountain and sea Thy bed/' ^ 

1 The Treasury of American Sacred Song, revised and enlarged 
edition, p. 349. 



Ill 

A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 

Long pondering on the subject has convinced me 
that the Church which bears the name of Christ 
needs to get rid of the infaUibihties it has set up — 
the Catholic portion of the infallibility of the Church 
centred and expressed in the Pope, and the Protestant 
of the infallibility of the Bible which was started by 
John Calvin, who, having to fight the idea of an 
infallible Church, thought he could best fight it with 
another infallibihty which he found, or thought he 
found, in the Bible. It may be confidently asserted 
that nothing expressed or reaching us through purely 
human channels is, or in the nature of things can be, 
infalUble. ''It is impossible to find in anjrthing 
which comes through the medium of a human mind 
an absolute ' Revelation.' There is always some 
dross with the gold, something individual and 
pecuHar, temporary and inadequate. ' No man hath 
seen God at any time,' nor is His voice heard speak- 
ing from heaven." ^ And the Bible bears on its very 
face the signs, not of infallibility, but of fallibility. 
The Old Testament portion is a progressive reveaUng, 

1 C. W. Emmet, in The Spirit. 
181 



182 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

and its very progressiveness excludes the idea of 
infallibility. It presents differing accounts of the 
same event — for example, of the creation story 
in the book of Genesis. It ascribes the same thing 
in one place to Jehovah, in another to Satan — as in 
the case of the numbering of the people bjr David, to 
name only two out of a multitude of such differences. 
Reams of good paper have been spoilt in attempts to 
reconcile such differences ; lives have been spent 
over them, but all in vain. Infallibility has been 
claimed for a book which makes no such claims for 
itself. '' The idea of the verbal infallibility of Scrip- 
tureis dead; not so its chief presupposition that some- 
how revelation must be the imparting of correct 
information, and inspiration the power of receiving it. 
And so attempts are still made, even by those who 
claim to accept the modem view of inspiration, to 
vindicate a special position and authority for the 
Bible, based not on its inherent truth and intrinsic 
appeal, but on something which can be regarded as 
unique in the manner of its composition. It must, 
at all costs, be given a special status in a class by 
itself, different not only in degree but in kind from 
all other books. ' ' ^ The oft-quoted passage in support 
of such a claim will not bear its weight, for it does 
not say all Scripture is inspired of God — and even 
if this were the right rendering it would not prove 
infaUibility ; there may be inspiration, and yet 
the writer may quite unconsciously mingle with its 
message the lower ideas and wishes of his own mind. 

1 C. W. Emmet, in The Spirit, p. 202. 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 183 

What the passage referred to says is this : '* Every 
scripture inspired of God is also profitable for 
doctrine, for teaching, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction which is in righteousness''^ — the 
inspired must of necessity in some way or other be 
profitable. But, in spite of this, many Protestants 
have in the past, and still do, set up the Bible as 
an infallible standard, probably desiring to feel that 
they have something infallible, and so are on an 
equaUty with the Catholic section of the Church. 
But all the claims and all the arguments will 
never endow either the Church or the Bible, both 
being at all events partly human creations, with 
an infallibility that the human never reaches. They 
may be inspired, they may have elements of truth, 
they may be highly profitable, but infallible, in the 
very nature of things, they cannot be. Only a book 
dropped straight from heaven could be infallible. 

" To many religious minds it will seem to be no 
light thing to abandon this hope of some external 
infallible authority. In our weakness we crave 
something definite on which to lean, something which 
may tell us without possibility of error what we are 
to believe. And yet here, too, the message of 
Christianity is that by losing our life we find it. 
It tells us to live dangerously and to take risks. It 
never allows us merely to play for safety ; in thought 
no less than in action we must be ready for adventure, 
to set forth into the unknown, each one for himself, 
in reliance on the Spirit of God.'' ^ 

1 2 Timothy iii. i6, Revised Version. 

2 C. W. Emmet, in The Spirit, p. 216, 



184 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

This idea of the inf alhbiUty of the Book has been 
fraught with the most harmfiil results. To many 
minds it has set the Book upon the throne, and has 
made it the monarch whose every word is of abiding 
authority, and, since that monarch gives varying 
and often contradictory commands, the result has 
been confusion of mind. 

It is high time, therefore, that out of this library 
we call the Bible, the product of many ages, and 
the outcome of many levels of ethical and spiritual 
ideals, there should be gathered that which is 
homogeneous with the teaching and spirit of Him 
who is the fullest and finest expression of the Divine 
Will with which we mortals have been blessed. 
The world needs a book harmonious in all its parts 
with Him who is its centre and climax. If out of 
the library we call the Bible such a book were 
compiled, before it every other sacred book of the 
world and every other religious book would hide 
their diminished heads. 

Objection may, and probably would be, raised by 
some to any touching of the Old Testament because 
of it having been quoted by Jesus. Many pleas 
have been put forward to show, by the use which 
Jesus made of it, that the Old Testament is authori- 
tative, and so sacrosanct over faith. But a little 
candid consideration will show how groundless is this 
claim. Let us try to realise the position of Jesus 
in regard to the Old Testament. To all intents 
and purposes it formed the whole Uterature to which 
He had access, or with which He was famihar. 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 185 

There were other and later hteratures, chiefly of 
an apocalyptic kind, written since the last of the 
books included in the Old Testament Canon ; but, 
though these influenced the thought of the people, 
they were not so accessible as were the Old Testa- 
ment writings, rolls of which were found in the 
sjmagogues of that age which existed in every town 
and even village. To one in the position of a 
peasant — which was that of Jesus — the Old Testa- 
ment books were the only literature, the only Ubrary 
accessible. Portions of these he had as a child 
committed to memory, and as the oriental memory, 
from lack of books and difiiculty of writing as an 
aid to it, was very retentive, these portions were 
sure to be prominent in His mind. Upon these, 
therefore, it was natural for Jesus to draw in 
illustration of His teaching, or in rephes to His 
opponents, or in sustenance of His own soul. The 
preacher or teacher or writer may, to illustrate the 
subject in hand, quote from Shakespeare, or Milton, 
or Dante, or Tennyson, or Browning, or even Walt 
Whitman ; but it does not follow that he approves 
or believes every statement or sentiment contained 
in their writings ; indeed, some of these he may very 
heartily disapprove or even condemn. And it 
certainly does not follow that because Jesus quoted 
certain passages, that He set His seal on the whole 
book from Genesis to Malachi as the abiding Word 
of God. To make such a claim is manifestly 
absurd, and will convince no one who brings a 
candid mind to its consideration. 



186 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

I have gone carefully over all the passages said 
to have been quoted by Jesus from the Old Testa- 
ment, and I am impressed, not by their number, 
but, considering that it was the only literature with 
which He was familiar, by their fewness. Many of 
these, instead of giving support to the Old Testament, 
are occupied with refutation of its teaching, or in 
showing how it has been rendered obsolete by the 
fuller Ught He had brought ; whilst some are only 
references to what existed in the olden time, espe- 
cially that which is called Mosaic. Many passages 
often regarded as quotations by Jesus did not fall 
from His lips at all, but from those of the Evan- 
gelists. Hence the survey I have made in no wise 
tends to make the Old Testament so sacrosanct that 
it must be so regarded as everywhere the Word of 
God as not to be judged in the light of the fuller 
revealing of Jesus and its contents estimated thereby. 
There is not a word that I have come across that 
should lead us to think that the Old Testament is 
inerrant. Indeed, a candid consideration of the 
treatment by Jesus of the Old Testament points in 
quite a different direction. The attempt, therefore, 
on the part of some, by speaking of ''the Saviour's 
Bible,'' to warn men off from a reasonable but 
reverent treatment of its contents, after long and 
careful consideration, in my judgment, falls to the 
ground. 

" There was nothing in Christ's attitude or example 
to justify anyone in any belief which is out of har- 
mony with the true Christian spirit or the perfect 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 187 

moral goodness of the Divine Character, or which 
is found to be inconsistent with truth, however 
made known, on the plea that it may be supported 
by hymns, prayer-books, or Old and New Testament 
Scriptures. All these must of necessity partake 
of the temporary peculiarities and infirmities 
belonging to various mental environments, and, 
therefore, their highest moral aim can only be 
fulfilled age after age, as Christ fulfilled the moral 
aim of the ' Law ' and the ' Prophets ' by rising 
morally out of and beyond their human infirmities, 
by departing, if needs be, from their letter in order 
to follow the higher guidance of their spirit/'^ 

There is no valid reason why, leaving out all that 
has been rendered obsolete by the fuller light of 
Christ, but retaining all that is in harmony with 
His teaching and spirit, and so for their edification, 
men now should not, by joining such parts of the 
Old to the New Testament, make for the Christian 
people of to-day a book which through and through 
should be so in harmony with their Master's thought 
and feehng as to be a direction and stimulus to their 
devotion and obedience to Him who is above and 
beyond all others the Light and Life of men. 

Books have been edited by very able men which 
give those portions of the Old and New Testaments 
remarkable for their literary beauty. A like work 
needs to be done which should give all of the Bible 
that is in harmony with the mind and spirit of 
Jesus, and so for the quickening and nourishing 
of His spirit in its readers. 

^ The Spirit of Christianity, by Frederic Seebohm, p. 99. 



188 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

The entire Bible should and would remain in the 
Authorised Version as a great piece of literature, 
remarkable both for its actual contents, as contri- 
buted by its writers in its original languages, and 
for the loveliness of its English rendering, through 
which people might roam as they do through other 
books which have attained classic rank, but with 
no compulsion to accept all its varied and often 
contradictory reUgious views. There the entire 
book would stand for use by scholars and lovers of 
Uterature, and all those interested in the evolution 
of the Christian religion. 

" A religion that makes a particular tradition deter- 
minative of its action prejudices to the modem 
mind its claim to Divine sanction. For to modem 
men, as to the first Christians, what is primary in 
religion is not the Then and There, but the Now and 
Here of God's relation to men.''^ 

More than half a century ago the English-speaking 
Churches set their best scholars, or those they deemicd 
their best, to revise the Authorised Version of the 
Bible, and after years of toil they gave us what is 
called the Revised Version, which, though falling 
short of the lovely EngUsh of its predecessor, does 
correct many errors, and makes more clear many 
passages which before were difficult of comprehen- 
sion. 

A still more needed work remains to be done — out 
of the library we call the Bible, to choose and give 
the world all that is in accord with the spirit and 
^ Where is Christ ? by an Anglican Priest in China, p. 85. 



A HOIVIOGENEOUS BIBLE 189 

teaching of Him who is admitted to be its very 
Centre and Crown. 

But there are also things in the New Testament 
out of harm^ony with this supreme Word, and which 
have given infinite trouble, not to the careless or 
indifferent, but to the most sensitive and holy souls. 
I mean such passages as that concerning foreknow- 
ledge, predestination, and election in the Epistle 
to the Romans — which are quite out of harmony, 
not only with the words and spirit of Jesus, but out 
of harmony with St. Paul himself in his higher and 
clearer moments. The doctrine contained in such 
passages is rejected and denounced by the Methodist 
Church in all its branches,^ which has a larger 
membership than any other save the Roman Catholic. 
It was the doctrine of election that grew out of 
this passage which separated and led to strife between 
Wesley and Whitefield, the two great leaders of the 
EvangeUcal Revival in the eighteenth century. 
To-day, save in a section of the Baptists which 
followed Mr. Spurgeon, and in certain of the Brethren 
who go under the name of Plymouth, this predestina- 
tion and election doctrine is rejected, and even where 
it is not formally rejected it is rarely, if ever, 
preached. This doctrine can easily be refuted from 
other parts of the writings of St. Paul himself, who, 
if he were here, would probably wish it excised from 
his writings. Indeed, St. Paul's own doctrine, as 

1 There are those in Wales who call themselves Calvinistic 
Methodists, but I believe, whilst retaining the Methodism, they 
have dropped, or nearly so, the Calvinism. 



190 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

expressed in his Epistles, is not homogeneous. It 
has been clearly shown that, as time went on, his 
doctrine was developed and clarified by his growing 
knowledge and experience. Dr. George Matheson 
says of the Epistle to the Romans, in which this 
doctrine of election and predestination occurs, " it 
is still within the boundary of the old, though it 
belongs to a glimmering of the new.'' 

When this doctrine of predestination appears in 
philosophical works under the name of Necessarian- 
ism or Determinism it is the object of sharp attack 
from many religious quarters. And yet because 
the Apostle, under the influence of his old Rabbinic 
teachers — an influence he had not then wholly thrown 
off — put this doctrine into one of his epistles, there it 
remains as a cause of trouble to vast numbers in the 
past and of division between those who were really 
one at heart. St. Paul was a great Apostle, to whom 
our debt is very great, and, at his best, a superlatively 
fine teacher of the Gospel ; but truth is more than 
even a great Apostle, as he would be the first to 
acknowledge, as we can see from his own words : 
'* Who, then, is Paul, and who is ApoUos, but ministers 
by whom ye believed ? '' As Dr. Inge says : '' The 
ultimate authority, which alone is infallible, is the 
eternal and living truth.'' ^ Reverence for an Apostle 
must give way to reverence for truth. Passages 

1 Faith and its Psychology, by Dr. Inge, p. 123. Plato makes 
Socrates say to Phaedrus : " You seem to consider not whether 
a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what 
country he comes." — PhcBdrus, 276. 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 191 

out of harmony with the standard of truth in Jesus, 
if not removed from the pages of the New Testa- 
ment, should be regarded as not authoritative over 
faith. The Presbyterian Church has removed from 
its Confession of Faith the article on the Decrees of 
God founded on St. Paul's words ; surely something 
should be done to render innocuous the root from 
which that terrible Article sprang. The greatness 
of truth is more than the greatness of an Apostle, 
great as he was, and the truth should be allowed to 
prevail. 

And if such a homogeneous Bible is needed for 
Christian lands, how much greater is the need for it 
when missionaries go to call other peoples to the 
Christian Faith. Surely they should go not with two 
books — one setting forth the Jewish and the other 
the Christian Faith^ — but with one book presenting 
one object for faith and permeated with one spirit. 
To compel or even encourage the heathen to enter 
the Christian Church by the gate of a Jewish book 
is, in another form, to do the very thing against 
which St. Paul fought with all his might. He 
firmly took his stand on this, that the Gentiles 
should be allowed to enter the Christian company 
without the initiatory or any other rite peculiar 
to Judaism ; only faith should be demanded of them. 
But to present the Old Testament, with all wherein 
it falls short or differs in matter or spirit from 
the New, as in any way essential, is substantially 
to take the very course against which St. Paul fought 
with all his energy. Whilst, beyond this, to present 



192 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

the warlike parts of the Old Testament to tribes 
such as those in Africa, all too disposed to fighting 
one another, is most inadvisable. For this very 
reason, as I have shown in a previous chapter, in the 
fovirth century Ulphilas, the translator of the Bible 
for the Goths, omitted the books of Kings, including 
the books of Samuel, from his translation. To take 
the Old Testament, in which there are many examples 
of polygamy, even in the case of the Hebrew 
patriarchs, who are held in honour in its pages, is 
only to encourage tribes given to polygamy in a 
course from which missionaries seek to turn them.^ 
In a word, to present to those as yet unwon to Chris- 
tianity a book which in many cases contains lower 
ideals and teaching than those of that faith is 
manifestly the wrong way, and if men were not so 
wedded to the misleading idea that they must have 
a whole Bible this would at once be seen. So long 
as men's vision is obsessed by that unsound idea 
the progress of Christianity will be hindered at 
home and still more abroad. 

An incident once came under my notice which 
shows this to be the case. A mother anxious for 
the spiritual welfare of her son, who was going to sea, 
gave him a Bible, making him promise that he would 
read it every day. Desiring to keep his promise, he 
opened the great Ubrary called the Bible and hap- 
pened on something in the Old Testament which 
rather shocked than helped him ; as a result, the 

1 The Mormons support their practice of polygamy by references 
to the examples of it in the Old Testament Scriptures, 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 193 

book was put aside. Some time afterwards a wise 
friend spoke to him of some beautiful incident in 
the Gospels, which arrested his attention and drew 
him to faith. What the whole Bible, of which so 
many unwisely talk, did not accomphsh, a small 
part wisely chosen did accomplish. 

There may be, there often is, over-emphasis on 
the book, emphasis which sometimes hides the 
real Word of God. Those lajdng such imdue empha- 
sis on the book — ^the whole book — should remember 
that the earUest, and, in some senses, the greatest 
successes of the Christian Faith were won without 
a book, for, in the earliest days of Christianity the 
Apostles did not carry the Old Testament in their 
hands, and the New Testament Scriptures had not 
then been written. In the earliest days of Chris- 
tianity only letters of St. Paul had been written, 
and they were known only to the httle companies 
to which they were addressed, and not till many a 
year had passed was the Gospel record written ; 
so that the earUest, and, perhaps, greatest triumphs 
of the Christian Faith were not won with a book, 
but by the story of the Christ proclaimed in the 
method of the herald, illustrated and enforced by 
the Uves of those who thus proclaimed it. 

For the task of compiling such a book as I have 
indicated the Church should select, not as in 
the case of Bible revision, its finest scholars, but 
its men, aye, and its women, too, of loftiest Chris- 
tian character, of purest heart, and so clearest in 
their vision of God, and of deepest insight into the 
13 



194 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

needs of men, and, in the most devout and reverent 
spirit, they should give themselves to this great 
and deeply needed work. 

Oh, what hindrances such a book would remove ! 
What difificulties it would solve ! What heartaches 
it would save ! 

Such a book would be the Golden Book of the 
World. ^ 

For advocating such a book there will probably 
come down on me the maledictions of the Bibliolaters 
at the touching of their idol. But these will not 
move me. In a long life, truths for which I stood 
and became the target for many shafts, have now 
come to be accepted. And it may be that what 
I now advocate, when the attacks it is sure to meet 
have died down, will, some day — it may be near, it 
may be far off — ^be realised, to the help and assur- 
ance of a multitude of souls and to the increase of 
the Kingdom of God in the world. 

Freed from the tyranny of the literalist and the 
dogmatist, this great result of a Bible homogeneous 
in spirit may and probably will be achieved, to 

^ There are already in existence many examples of selection 
from the Scriptures, not only for literary but for religious 
purposes, such as the Lectionary of the Anglican Church, which, 
unhappily, is not homogeneous ; only portions of Scriptures are 
given in the Roman Breviary, whilst in the Jewish Prayer Book 
only certain psalms from the Psalter appear. Many sections of 
the Free Churches follow this Jewish example, and Professor 
Sanday pleaded for the elimination of the unsuitable portions of 
the Psalter from the Book of Common Prayer, whilst Professor 
Mayor published a selection of parts suitable for use in Christian 
worship. 



A HOMOGENEOUS BIBLE 195 

the prosperity of the Christian Faith and its wider 
acceptance in the world. 

And even if such a book should not come into 
existence — and the prejudices in the way may pre- 
vent it for many a long day — the presentation of 
the idea of a Bible from beginning to end in har- 
mony with the thought and spirit of Him who is the 
real Word of God may help men to feel free to 
accept for their own edification only that in the 
whole Bible which is really in harmony with the 
fullest expression of the heart of God which has 
reached us. 



IV 

THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 

There is still another question which remains to 
be considered — Did inspiration cease with the close 
of the Canon of Scripture ? I may, perhaps, best 
introduce this question by quoting a paragraph which 
appeared in a widely read paper on " Making your 
own Bible " : 

*' ' Then why don't you make your own Bible ? 
I have made mine, and in the reading and the 
making it has helped me more than an3^hing else 
except the good influence of others/ There was 
nothing profane in the suggestion. That gracious 
personality dwelling in the frail body of an invalid 
on her couch, away from the busy Ufe lived outside, 
was utterly incapable of profanity. With an intui- 
tion that partook of the miraculous, she discovered 
lonely boys and girls and got them to come and have 
tea with her, especially on Sundays. It was my 
turn last Sunday, and I had been just frank with her, 
as I could have been with no one else in the universe. 
' No,' I repeated, ' I don't go to church or chapel 
much, because I find it so generally unsatisfactory, 
and I find the Bible the hardest book in the world 
to read profitably. I suppose it's my own fault.' 
' My dear,' she said, ' to-morrow I will send you a 

195 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 197 

nice big manuscript book, and therein make your 
own Bible. Write down in it anything — verses from 
the Bible, from the poets, sentences from sermons, 
books, plays, conversations — anything on which 
your own heart puts the hall-mark of approval, and 
you will have a Bible worthy of the name/ " 

The suggestion of this gracious personality of a 
greater Bible would in many quarters startle and 
arouse the most violent opposition, for the idea is 
widespread that Divine inspiration ceased centuries 
ago with the closing of the Biblical Canon. It is, 
therefore, worth while to ask what does the idea of 
the ceasing of inspiration with the close of the Canon 
of the Bible involve ? That, for a certain period in 
the world's history, and to a certain tiny nation in 
Palestine, God was in the habit of speaking, but that 
is now over. Having said His last word nearly 
two thousand years ago. He is now silent. He is an 
ancient, not a living God. He once had contact 
with men, but He has this no longer. He is a 
subject for the antiquarian, discoverable only in 
musty manuscripts written in other languages and 
idioms than ours — a God of the ancient, not of the 
modem world — a God of a closed and finished book. 
Such a God does not and should not satisfy men. 
Certainly, my heart craves, nothing less will satisfy 
it, than a Living God, as near to us as to any ancient 
race, as surely inspiring men to-day as in any past 
period of the world's history. One of the first to 
fight the idea of a silenced God was Thomas Carlyle, 
whose words, strong as they are, are not too strong 



198 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

against the antiquarianism which has so long 
afflicted the Church. 

" There is no creature more fatal than your pedant ; 
safe as he esteems himself, the terriblest issues 
spring from him. Human crimes are many, but 
the crime of being deaf to God's voice, of being 
blind to all but parchments and antiquarian rubrics 
when the Divine handwriting is abroad on the sky — 
certainly there is no crime which the Supreme 
Powers do more terribly avenge/'^ 

Dr. Inge follows along the same line when he 
says : 

" The Bible of the race is not yet fully written ; 
and we must not forget that an exaggerated view of 
the infallibility of Holy Writ depresses and deprives 
of authority all the other channels through which 
we are justified in believing that the Divine will 
is made known to us. I do not refer only to the 
writings of great and good men outside the Canon, 
and even outside the Christian Church, to whom a 
minor degree of inspiration may be attributed with- 
out any disrespect to the Bible, but to Divine revela- 
tion through science, through art, through the 
beauties of nature, through the course of history, 
and so forth. Make any one of these infallible, and 
the rest lose their value.'' ^ 

" We insist on the universality and the continuity 
of the creative working of the Divine Spirit. If He 
is always and everywhere helping and raising man 
He is also always teaching him." ^ 

1 Carlyle : Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, Part VI. 

2 Faith and its Psychology, by Dr. Inge, p. 121. 

3 C. W. Emmet : The Spirit, p. 200. 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 199 

" An Anglican Priest in China " sees that love 
involves continued intercourse with men : 

" The unreadiness of theology to accept the data 
of the present is bound up with ignorance of the 
facts of love. We do not know what love is doing 
m the world/' ^ 

The first followers of Jesus were led to expect this 
by the assurance which the Fourth Gospel contains 
of a Spirit who should lead into all truth, which 
surely must have given them not a backward but 
a forward look. And indeed, certain of them, those 
who wrote the Epistles, wrote with the consciousness 
of an inspiring Spirit. They were the leaders in 
an inspirational way which has never been closed. 
And men and women in all the ages following theirs 
have written with a consciousness more or less 
clearly felt of the influence of the same inspiring 
Spirit. Many, perhaps most great writers, especially 
the poets, have been conscious of such an inspiring 
influence. 

That remarkable man, Jones Very, once the 
teacher of Greek at Harvard, would not allow his 
sonnets to be touched, for, he said, " I value them 
not because they are mine, but because they are 
not mine.'' That gifted hymn- writer, Thomas 
Homblower Gill, once said to me, " I am conscious 
of tides of song when verse flows from me, I know not 
how. At other times I cannot write, and if I do 
the results are worthless.'' One of the really great 

1 When is Christ ? by an Anglican Priest in China. 



200 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

hymns of recent times, " O Love that will not let me 
go/' was written by my friend Dr. George Matheson, 
in a few minutes, and he says, " I felt myself rather 
in the position of one who was being dictated to than 
of an original artist/' 

'* R. L. Stevenson, not altogether playfully, attri- 
butes his stories to the Brownies, both when he is 
asleep and even, to some extent, during his waking 
hours. Blake attributes his poems to spiritual 
helpers. As he walked along the shore he was 
haunted by the forms of Moses and the prophets, 
of Homer and Milton, who seemed to commimicate 
to him directly what he was to write. ' I may praise 
it,' he says, ' since I dare not pretend to be other 
than the secretary ; the authors are in eternity. 
I have written this poem from immediate dictation, 
twelve, or sometimes, twenty or thirty, lines at a 
time without premeditation and even against my 
will.' So Boehme, speaking of his visions, says, 
' Whatever I could bring into outwardness that 
I wrote down. The work is none of mine, but the 
Lord's instrument, wherewith He doeth what He 
will/ "^ 

That this is not a conviction only of our modem 
days is clear from the fact that it was asserted by 
John Milton, who says : 

" This is not to be obtained but by devout prayer 
to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utter- 
ance and knowledge, and sends His Seraphim with 
the hallowed fire of His Altar to touch and purify 
the lips of whom He pleases." 

^ C. W. Emmet: The Spirit, p. 211. 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 201 

And, five centuries before the birth of the Christian 
Faith, Plato said : 

" For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, 
and there is no invention in him until he has been 
inspired, and is out of his senses, and the mind is 
no longer in him ; when he has not attained to this 
state he is powerless, and is imable to utter his 
oracles/' ^ 

'* Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write 
poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration ; they 
are Uke diviners or soothsayers who also may say 
many things, but do not understand the meaning 
of them." ^ 

" For poets are a divine race, and often in their 
strains by the aid of the Muses and Graces they 
attain truth." ' 

And if inspiration is to be judged by its results, 
there are a multitude of passages, not only in the 
great but even in httle-known authors, who, in some 
high moments, have given birth to words which the 
world will never willingly let die, and which not 
only deserve rank with, but in many instances rise 
far above, certain portions of Scripture.* 

The Scriptures have a special preciousness as 
being to us the earliest expression of that Divine 
inspiration whose culmination was the Life which 

^ Ion, 534. a Apology, 22. 

* Laws, 682. Jowett's translation. 

* Instances of these may be seen in the case of what is re- 
garded by competent judges as the finest sonnet in the language, 
by Blanco White, "Mysterious Night,'* in Francis William 
Bourdillon's " The Night has a Thousand Eyes," in David 
Attwood Wasson's ** All's well/' and in others which might be 
named. 



202 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

is the Light of the World. Beyond this they give 
us the earUest representations of the influence of 
such inspiration on the souls of men., in the Old 
Testament on the Jew and in the New Testament 
on the Christian. These, being first experiences, 
became types, and, unfortunately in some cases, 
moulds into which later experiences were made to 
run. The Scriptures are to the religious what the 
Greek classics are to the intellectual realm — ^first 
expressions. They both have the dew of youth 
upon them. They are the founts of inspiration. 
They are the leaders of those who come after. But 
neither the Bible nor the Greek classics should be 
regarded as closing the door against any after in- 
spiration. The greatest lover of Plato or Aristotle does 
not say, *' Here is the end." They are rather begin- 
nings, and no wise man will ever say : " The Bible 
is the end, the closing of the door against any 
after inspirations." No, the central figure of the 
Bible — ^the Christ — says : " The Spirit of Truth 
shall lead you into all truth." The look of Christ 
is not backward to the past but forward to the 
future. 

I agree with every word of Mr. Lowell in his 
great poem " Bibliolaters '' : 

" God is not dumb, that He should speak no more. 

If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor. 

There towers the Mountain of the Voice no less, 
WTiich whoso seeks shall find, but he who bends 

Intent on manna still and mortal ends. 
Sees it not, neither hears its thundered lore. 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 208 

" Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 

And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone : 
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it. 
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moaji. 
While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud, 
While thunder surges burst on cliffs of cloud. 
Still at the prophet's feet the nations sit." 

And all this is justified by the facts. God is still 
inspiring men, just as really now as in the ancient 
times. Emerson clearly discerned and finely 
expressed this : 

" Gut from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 
The litanies of nations came. 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame 
Up from the burning core below — 
The canticles of love and woe." 

And later in the same poem he says : 

" The word by seers and sibyls told, 
In groves of oak or fanes of gold, 
Still floats upon the morning wind. 
Still whispers to the v/illing mind. 
One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world hath never lost." 

Every thoughtful person's Bible is made up not 
only from the words there which have found his 
soul, but from a multitude of later inspired minds. 
Search into the inner sanctuary of souls and you will 
find alongside of dear passages from the Bible others 
from inspired writers of later ages — from men who 
were as conscious of inspiration as Isaiah or Paul. I 
should find in some, by the side of chosen Bible 
words, passages from greatly loved hymns. To 



204 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

many the hymn-book is almost as precious as the 
Bible, for it is the Bible in solution — Bible truth 
fused into forms of beauty suited to our modem 
times. In others I should find passages from the 
great spiritual men we call poets : from Milton, 
Shakespeare, Herbert, Vaughan, Tennyson, the 
Brownings, George MacDonald, and others too 
numerous to mention. In others I should find 
words from the really great preachers, Uke Robert- 
son of Brighton, or Phillips Brooks of Boston, or 
Thomas Binney, or James Martineau. By such 
men souls have been nourished. 

If I were to reveal my own experience I should 
need to quote from a great variety of writers, both in 
verse and prose, a multitude of passages on which my 
soul has often been stayed. To give only one or two. 
I am not well versed in Dante, nor, indeed, a fervid 
lover of him ; but here and there I have foimd in 
him great words of support. For example, that 
brief word of which Matthew Arnold was so fond, 
and which he reckoned the finest Une in poetry : 

*' In His will is our peace." 

Then there are lines in Arthur Hugh Clough : 

" It fortifies my soul to know 
That, though I perish, Truth is so. 
That, howsoever I stray or range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That if I slip Thou dost not fall. " 

Then, in Tennyson's Unes in " In Memoriam," 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 205 

I have found the most concise and convincing 
argument for our immortaUty : 

" Thou madest man, he knows not why : 

He thinks he was not made to die ; 
And Thou hast made him : Thou art just." ^ 

Whilst there often creeps into my soul the tender, 
plaintive music of those Unes of his : 

" And the stately ships go on 

To their haven under the hill ; 
But, oh ! for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still ! " 

wliich suggests that as ships which vanish from our 
sight do not cease to be, so those whose hands we 
can no longer clasp and whose voices we can no 
longer hear have not ceased out of the universe of 
God. 

Mrs. Browning has often kindled faith in my heart, 
and her husband has helped me when the stress of 
doubt has been heavy on my soul. What a rationale 
of the Gospel is that with which the '' Epistle of the 
Arab Physician '' closes : 

" Think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice. 
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face My hands fashioned, see it in Myself. 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of Mine, 
But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
And thou must love Me, who have died for thee ! " 

^ That is to say, in the very warp and woof of man's nature — 
that nature being of God— there is the conviction that he was 
not made to die — therefore, God must fulfil the conviction which 
springs out of the nature He has given. 



206 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

What a directory for faith I have found in Whittier 
when, for example, he says : 

" By all that He requires of me 
I know what God Himself must be.** 

Or when he says : 

" Nothing can be good in Him 
Which evil is in me." 

Or in those hnes which have brought comfort to 
thousands : 

*' I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air ; 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond His love and care." 

The poets, far more than the theologians, have 
tided us over dark times when faith almost suffered 
eclipse. Poets like Tennyson and Browning have 
been the chief helpers to faith to multitudes in our 
day. 

We have all in our minds passages outside as well 
as inside the Bible, which have " found us.'' And, 
remember, inclusion in the Bible does not render 
words true, nor does exclusion render them less true. 
Truth stands on its own feet. Truth shines by its 
own light. We should not put truths found in the 
Bible in a class apart. 

'* The test whether a writer is inspired is simply 
whether his message is true. All revelation must 
be judged by its inherent truth, by its power of 
finding us and appealing to our conscience, by the 



THE EVER-INSPIRING SPIRIT 207 

degree in which it calls out the best in us and awakens 
the response of the highest part of our natiure/'^ 

There is fellowship in truth ; all truth is akin. 
There is a real brotherhood among all God's prophets; 
the covers of the Bible do not shut any in or shut 
any out. The prophets of God in all ages know each 
other and join hands with one another. It is ours 
to welcome all who ** find us/' to make them 
friends, and respond to their inspired words. 

Even John Keble, narrowed though he was by 
his ecclesiastical ideas, yet, when his poetic nature 
lifted him higher, could not help discerning this, 
and so we find him exclaiming : 

'* Meanwhile, with every son and saint of Thine 

Along the glorious line, 
Sitting by turns beneath Thy sacred feet, 

W^e'U hold communion sweet ; 
Know them by look and voice, and thank them all 

For helping us in thrall. 
For words of hope and bright examples given. 
To show through moonless skies that there is light in heaven.* ' 

1 C. W. Emmet: The Spirit, pp. 215-16. 



PART V 

A FORWARD LOOK 

In the later part of the nineteenth century, when 
visions of the Fatherhood of God dawned upon 
certain men and filled and possessed their minds, after 
being kept so long within the limits of metaphysical 
or legal theologies, they were so fascinated to find 
that it was the very centre of the Gospel, that its 
great impUcation of the Brotherhood of Men, even 
though it had been drawn out and made explicit 
by Jesus and His first Apostles, was not clearly dis- 
cerned. I am far from saying that those who saw 
this vision of Fatherhood did not act in a brotherly 
way to their fellows ; many of them certainly did, 
and in a very noble spirit ; but their mental gaze 
was so intent, if I may so phrase it, upward to the 
Father, that it could not look laterally to the 
members of His great family. 

Perhaps one sign of this is the fact that sociology, 
which is concerned with relationships among men, 
did not arise till about thirty or forty years ago, and 
only of late did it begin to gain a place beside theo- 

208 



A FORWARD LOOK 209 

logy — the science of God^ — and so find its way into 
the thought of the Church. It may be that this 
was because men seem only able to go in one direc- 
tion at one time — one road seems to open before 
them, and in that, tmconscious of any other, they 
walk. 

But now, at last, Brotherhood among men — ^the 
implication of Fatherhood in God — is taldng rank 
with the truth out of which it sprang ; and perhaps 
in some quarters, is obscuring and almost hiding 
the truth out of which it sprang. 

On the Continent, certainly in France, the 
Brotherhood idea came first into existence. There 
it had not a religious but a pohtical origin. It was 
the child of the Revolution, and ever since the 
establishment of the Republic in France, fratemite 
has been a prominent idea in that coimtry. Go 
where you will in France, the word '' Fratemite " 
meets the eye, as part of the RepubUc's motto : 
"Liberte, EgaUte, Fratemite'*; but it seems sus- 
pended in mid-air, without any d5mamic to force it 
into fulfilment. In France the sense of the Divine 
Patemite is needed to give Ufe, to provide the 
dynamic to that of Fratemite. In other words, 
Fratemite needs the warmth of reUgious feehng to 
make it really influential. 

It is to be feared that this is sometimes lacking 
in the leaders of the trade unionists. Many of the 

1 My use of that term does not imply approval of it, since I 
hold that a science of God is impossible here and now to 
men. 

14 



210 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

original leaders were reared within the Churches, 
specially the Free Churches, where they not only 
learnt the art of speaking, but were influenced by 
their reUgious spirit. Happily this is still the 
case with some of these leaders ; but it is less 
evident in those of a later generation. It is some- 
what to be feared that in their case the sense of 
brotherhood, which often reaches to a very high 
ethical level, leading to noble self-sacrifice which 
I, for one, greatly admire, should miss that sense 
of the Divine Fatherhood which would tend to 
permeate it with a rehgious spirit and so keep it 
alive and enduring. It is greatly to be desired that 
this sense of the Divine Fatherhood should be 
acquired by these younger leaders, for it would Uft 
and keep their propaganda at loftier levels and fill 
it with a sweeter spirit. 

On the other hand, there are gleams of hope in 
the Brotherhoods which grew out of the Adult 
Schools and now have a vast membership, where 
the sense of Human Brotherhood is in close contact 
with the sense of the Divine Fatherhood, and is thus 
deeply permeated with a rehgious spirit. If these 
Brotherhoods will carry that spirit into the larger 
company of workers to which they belong they will 
do a vast service to the whole of society. 

But if there be some Uttle fear of the sense of the 
Fatherhood being lost in that of the Brotherhood in 
the Labour Movement in Great Britain and America, 
it is not so in that movement in India. Mr. B. P. 
Waida, of the Madras Labour Union, speaking at 



A FORWARD LOOK 211 

a conference in Brovming Hall on " Labour and 
Religion/' said of the Trade Union Movement 
in India that '' the religious point of view is funda- 
mental ; it is not merely idealistic, not only pro- 
ducing a vision, but is applied in a very practical 
fashion. Our labourers, our people, believe that 
they are in a particular sphere, bom into this 
particular life, not to get rich, not to get on in the 
world, but so to use their own powers, the moral 
law within them, to unfold those powers to such an 
extent that they may reaUse in a better fashion by 
practical experience the Fatherhood of God/' 

Doubtless, in India, reKgion is so the first factor 
in Ufe that this is easier there than in the West ; 
but even in the West religion, if not so ^%plicit, is 
really implicit, and needs only to be called out by a 
true vision of the Fatherhood. At the same con- 
ference Mr. W. H, Eastman, who all his Ufe has 
been in the ranks of Labour, and a trade union 
member, expressed his conviction that the religion 
which is implicit can be made ^%plicit, and said that, 
whilst the Labour Movement up to the present has 
not been materiaHstic, it is in danger of becoming 
so at the present moment, and that nothing will 
save it from becoming materialistic more than adirect 
appeal to the spiritual and deeper part in each one 
of us. 

Here, then, lies the task of the followers of Jesus, 
the great Revealer of this Fatherhood, to carry the 
great idea of Fraternity, warmed and so made 
powerful by the idea of the Divine Paternity, to 



212 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

all men, so that it shall become the Zeitgeist of the 
days to come. 

That an idea can be wrought into the thinking of 
a nation has been abundantly proved by the fact 
that a worship of the State leading to entire obedi- 
ence to its commands was forced by books, teaching, 
personal influence into the mind of Germany, and 
provided the widespread feeHng which culminated 
in the Great War, and led to that country's over- 
throw. And if a false idea (and falsehood has in it no 
inherent life) can be wrought into a nation's mind, 
how much more can a true idea, which, like every 
true idea, has life in it, be in still higher ways 
wrought into the very texture of the mind and 
heart of a nation, and even of the world. 

To some minds the black doings of 1914-18 seem 
a decisive denial of this idea of brotherhood, and 
a bar to its progress. But, it may be, this was only 
an awful parenthesis between the vision of the Father- 
hood and the attainment of Brotherhood, which 
needs must follow it as the day the night ; or, it 
may be, it was the overthrow of false ideas of how 
the race could be kept in peace, such as the com- 
plexity of commerce, or the bonds which art, science, 
knowledge, weave between the nations, which all 
gave way under the stress of passion, to throw men 
back upon the eternal idea of Fatherhood in God 
leading to Brotherhood among men, and so upon 
those ethical and spiritual elements which alone 
lead to a imity which can bear the strain arising in 
times of sudden crisis. Surely it is clear that the 



A FORWARD LOOK 213 

only uniting forces among men are and must be 
ethical and spiritual, and that these rise to their 
highest character and force when they spring out of 
our vision of Him '' in whom we Uve and move and 
have our being/' 

No greater task can be laid by the elders whose 
days are chiefly in the past upon those with the 
greater part of life before them than to carry forward 
with fiery zeal this message, not only with the words 
of the lips, but still more by the action and spirit 
of their Uves ; for in this alone seems to lie not 
merely the blessedness but the very continuance 
of the race. 

The awful outlook on the world of to-day seems 
to suggest that the race must, in an ethical and 
spiritual sense, become better, or before long it will 
come to an end. If, for example, men's hands 
are not restrained by the enthusiasm of humanity 
in their hearts from the use of the destructive inven- 
tions which science is every day rendering more 
destructive, then the day mey not be far distant 
when the whole earth may be rendered as tenantless 
as the Great Sahara. 

But surely it cannot be that the human race, which 
through long seons has slowly climbed from the 
lowest levels up to its present high position, can, 
by the very growth of its capacity, used in a wrong 
direction for destructive rather than constructive 
purposes, come to such an awful and imtimely end ! 
All that is needed to change the whole relationship 
between individuals and nations, and so save the world. 



214 THE GOD THAT JESUS SAW 

is a right feeling behind man's great powers, which 
would lead to a right use of those powers, and to 
a proper relationship between the various famiUes 
of which the earth's population is composed. " Out 
of the heart are the issues of life '' ; and from a like 
source must come, if it ever come, the concord and 
unity of mankind. And the only dynamic to this 
seems to he in the One Great Fatherhood which, 
really accepted, issues, and must issue, in a real 
Brotherhood of Men. 

And so we are brought back to Jesus and His 
Gospel, to which, in any vital sense, we owe the 
vision of this Divine Fatherhood — ^the true source 
of any Brotherhood worthy of the name, and 
vital enough to become the bond binding men every- 
where to one another because vitally bound to the 
One Great Father. 

More than thirty years ago Dr. Hatch closed his 
Hibbert Lectures with these prophetic words : 

'* For, though you may beheve that I am but a 
dreamer of dreams, I seem to see, though it be on the 
far horizon — the horizon beyond the fields which 
either we or our children will tread — a Christianity 
which is not new but old, which is not old but new 
— a Christianity in which the moral and spiritual 
elements will again hold their place, in which men 
will be bound together by the bond of mutual service, 
which is the bond of the sons of God, a Christianity 
which will actually reaUse the Brotherhood of Men, 
the ideal of the first commimities."^ 

* The Hibbert Lectures (1888), by Dr. Hatch, p. 553. 



A FORWARD LOOK 215 

" A mighty change, 
Enfolded in the troubled womb of time, 
Shapeth itself in silence ; foolish hopes 
And fond alarms disquiet faithless breasts ; 
Love waits the birth unfaltering. The wise world 
Hath not forgot how in a simple room 
A Jewish craftsman with his fisher friends 
Once ate their farewell supper ; high priests hissed 
Their spite ; Rome curled a lip of sickly scorn : 
But life was with the little brother-band. 
And mankind's slow salvation. Love can wait.*' ^ 

1 The March of Man, by Alfred Hayes. 



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